Plurkshop #6: Measuring Social Media Effectiveness

Yesterday marked another fantastic Plurkshop, hosted by David Alston of Radian6, a groundbreaking social media monitoring company.

What is a Plurkshop?

Plurkshops started as spontaneous discussions on various topics over on the social networking site Plurk. They’ve evolved into regular discussions, scheduled specifically around certain topics, and open to the entire community. Fun, fast, and furious, they’re chock full of great information. (If you’d like to get news of future plurkshops, follow @Plurkshop on Plurk).

Talking Social Media Measurement

Marketing, PR and Social Media types are abuzz with the importance of finding ways to measure the impact of companies’ engagement with social media. We discussed some of the key questions on everyone’s minds:

What makes social media efforts so difficult to justify?

The term “social media” has gained acceptance, but it can be misleading in literal translation. The “social” aspect of SM can create an informal (and incorrect) impression that these tools are only for casual personal relationships vs. building brands and value for companies. And the “media” aspect is often seen as just another broadcast vehicle, held to traditional marketing and media metrics that may not accurately reflect social media’s holistic community impact.

Many companies are wary of trying social media until and unless they see concrete and tangible results, and success from competitors can be a might fine motivator. A collection of viable case studies from established companies using these tools to their benefit will help blaze a trail for others to follow.

Perhaps a different question: is there a cost to not being involved? What are you missing if you’re unplugged from the Groundswell? The more examples like Dell, Zappos, Fiskars and GM we uncover across different industries, the more readily we’ll be able to get companies on the train before it leaves the station.

Why measure?

Companies using or considering social media as part of their communication strategy want to establish the true ROI of these online networks. And for marketers, accurate measurement of the impact is important to establishing credibility and long-term viability for these new tools in a business setting.

We’re able to point to positive effects that we think are being generated by participation in social media – increased customer satisfaction, sales numbers – but the hard line from social media to sales has yet to be drawn clearly. If we can create a direct connection between a company’s engagement with their community and their growth, we’ll have something powerful indeed.

What are we measuring, really?

David asked at one point “do you want to measure the ‘social’ or the ‘media’?” which sparked some interesting answers.

Focus on the word “media” seems to drive people to measure social media effectiveness in the same way we’ve evaluated traditional direct marketing or public relations efforts (impressions, response rates, website visits, sales figures). But the word “social” means we ought to be measuring the quality and depth of the relationships with people that are fostered within communities. That will require discovering metrics that are reciprocal, not just one way.

Is Return on Investment really the right term, then? Perhaps we need to consider a new “I” when it comes to social media. How about these:

• Return on Initiative. What are we reaping from the effort when we look at it holistically?
• Return on Interaction. Are you having better conversations with your customers and do they feel more connected to you?
• Return on Involvement. Does this change how involved your customers want to be with your business?

Listening is an (the?) important facet of any successful social media effort, because it creates an avenue for customers to directly affect the products and services they purchase. What do you think, can you effectively measure the importance and impact of listening? How?

What makes measurement difficult?

Social media is a long-term strategy that takes time to show quantifiable results, and the agility and patience to make adjustments along the way. The nature of relationship building means that the impact may not be immediately visible, but will grow and strengthen over time. But because relationships and other “soft metrics” like community building are hard to quantify, it can be even harder to tie social media to the ever-present bottom line.

Monetization is key for most marketers in order to establish the direct line from marketing time and dollars spent to revenue earned. But revenue developed through social media is often indirect, and follows a winding (and hard to track) path from company to community and back again. That lack of clarity is what often causes a company to dismiss social media as unproven, risky, inefficient, or not valuable.

Is there anything we can measure?

From David’s arsenal:

• Mapping out the top influencers on a topic/brand and whether they are advocates (percentage of supporters amongst top influencers)
• Amount of “long tail” coverage (posts/commenting activity for or against your brand
• Tracking effectiveness of an outreach campaign/product launch over time (based on tracking WOM)
• Share of brand buzz vs. competitors online
• Engagement on website/forums/company blogs
• On topic inbound linking
• Total views/comments/unique commenters
• Level of engagement in commenting activity
• Speed of spread (how fast and idea is adopted and carried across all forms of social media)
• Social media to mainstream media hops (story growth beyond where it started) and vice versa
• Reaction time to engagement (most commenting activity happens in first 48 hours on a post)
• Comment acceleration (how fast a discussion on a topic is taking off/slowing down)
• Post sampling/collection (tweets, posts, comments are the new client testimonials)
• Favorites/diggs/vote counts
• Customer satisfaction (including tools like the Net Promoter Score)

So, what’s the case to be made for social media?

Social media is long term, and has to be viewed as an investment.

Social Media can support and strengthen other traditional marketing and public relations efforts by adding a listening channel.

Social Media is about building relationships, trust and community, not merely marketing.

If used properly, social media leads to
more and better connections with customers.

Making a strong case for using social media in business seems to still be an uphill battle for many. From companies who seem downright afraid to talk to their customers to those who view these efforts as nothing more than productivity killers, social media advocates clearly have their work cut out for them.

Showing the true value of social media means collecting and sharing crucial case studies outlining companies’ success. Do you have great examples to share of companies who have successfully used social media to build their business and bring value to their customers? Please share them with us!

Special thanks to David Alston for hanging out with us and giving of his time and expertise. For more information on Radian6 and the great stuff they’re doing, please check out their website.

Update: Check out Connie Reece’s great post on the Plurkshop, too, along with a rundown of the participants!

Plurkshop #4: Fractured Conversations and How to Manage Them

The internet – and social media in particular – has opened up vast arenas for conversation and feedback that can easily take on lives of their own. For small businesses, this kind of organic conversation can be especially valuable.

For instance, a post on your blog or website might prompt someone else to blog about you and then others to comment or share that via FriendFeed or StumbleUpon or Twitter and make commentary of their own. How to keep track? Tonight, our Plurkshop on the social community Plurk discussed the challenges and benefits of that reality, and uncovered a few tools to help listen to what’s being said about you, your company, and your brand on the web.

Challenges we cited:

• Conversations about you – your brand, your blog, your company – are happening everywhere, including in places you haven’t looked.
• Fragmented conversations across the web and so many tools for sharing information can make it difficult to keep track of what people are saying about you and your brand.
• Dispersed commentary makes us worry that we’re missing important feedback and opportunities to engage in conversation with people who are talking about us.
• The more a conversation fragments, the more it can lose context and relevance to the original topic. Comments without context can be less valuable to those who read them.
• As a business owner/brand manager/blogger, you need to go where the conversation is and respond to it there, which can be taxing if you have several brands and/or a lot of content that sparks discussion.
• Participating in discussions online can be intimidating for some people. How can you make it easy and welcoming for them to do so?

Some of the main takeaways from tonight:

• The spirit of community conversation is more important than trying to control it. And controlling it is futile, anyway, so it’s best to embrace it. Listen and engage as best you can.
• Fractured and organic discussion encourages new points of view. Different perspectives add value to the conversation. Actively encourage others to take the conversation to their own communities and build upon it or take it in a new direction.
• The community should be able to use whatever tools are helpful to them to engage the conversation and comment. Readers want and will embrace content portability so they can take the discussion wherever they want. It’s our job as those creating the content to do our best to follow it.
• Commenting and engaging others on their “turf” feels more natural, and demonstrates listening flexibility. It also gives businesses and brands opportunities to engage people they might not have otherwise found.
• Traveling conversation can expose new audiences to your content/brand/blog.
• Search Engine Optimization: Fractured conversations are good for search engine optimization so long as they link back the original source. Links that other people create to your content are gold, especially to bloggers and brands.
• The evolution of this kind of conversation is demonstrating the very essence – and power – of social media.
• Not all internet users find their information in the same manner, so the more avenues and options for them to participate, the better.

Some recommended tools to check out for listening/monitoring:

Google Alerts – Get email updates about search results for the terms you choose, including blogs
Technorati – Comprehensive blog search
Co.mments - track conversations related to sites you specify
Friendfeed comments plugin for WordPress users
Serph – A search engine tracking what’s being said online about your specific search terms
Addictomatic – a search engine that populates results from other sites and search engines.
Disqus - a comment system for your blog that claims to make comments more interactive and easier to manage
Radian6 – a more robust social media monitoring solution that requires some $$ investment
SiteMeter – free site counter and statistics tracker
ClickTracks – web analytics tools starting at about $50/month
Google Analytics – free web analytics tools
PageFlakes – you can create a customized page to aggregate your monitoring tools and sites
Statcounter – free hit counter and web stats tools
LiJit – a search widget for your blog that provides stats on your visitors and what they’re looking for
NetNewsWire – a Mac OS RSS feed reader
NetVibes – a personal page aggregator, like PageFlakes

Here’s the link to the full Plurkshop conversation. Take this back to your community and discuss how you’re listening to conversations, and what challenges and triumphs you’re having. What’s your take on the nomadic nature of conversation in today’s hyperconnected world?

Plurkshop #2: Blending Traditional And Social Media

Last night’s plurkshop opened with a great question from Beth Harte, who asked “Would you use traditional marketing to promote your social media efforts and vice versa?”

A great discussion ensued (hooray for threaded conversations), and it seems participants agreed that social media and traditional marketing should work together, and using some traditional avenues to drive traffic to social media sites can still be an effective awareness builder.
The main takeaways from last night:

• Social media should be integrated into an overall marketing plan whenever possible.

• Traditional marketing tactics like e-mail (yes, we all laughed about e-mail being “old school”), direct mail, and print advertising can still have a place in the social mediascape when used to really engage an audience and drive them to great content and information online.

• Traditional media is in fact still going to be necessary and very relevant for audiences that haven’t yet embraced online and social media outlets – older audiences, rural and non-broadband users, or simply late adopters. We all agreed that although all of us are very active in this space, we’re still in the minority.

• The trend is toward more spending on new media, while spending on traditional media continues to decrease. A recent report by Forrester expects that interactive advertising spending will move from an 8% share in 2007 to an 18% share in 2008. Overall, they’re predicting that total interactive marketing spending will surpass $61 billion in five years. Whoa.

And some great examples of Plurkshop attendees and their experiences with the blending of traditional and social media:

• Beth’s company is in a niche market, so she’s planning to leverage some traditional outreach like direct mail or e-mail marketing to drive adopters to a new social platform she’s considering. And, she’s working social media planning into her overall planning efforts as a single marketer in the company (you go, Beth!).

• Michael Jones’ newspaper publisher did multi-page spreads in all four of their papers to promote their new website. The result: The day the site launched, they got more visitors than the publisher did papers. And even the 60-year old owner is doing podcasts. Talk about embracing a new medium!

• McDonald’s is running a TV ad campaign right now that by pointing viewers to a MySpace page that’s part of the campaign, encouraging them to submit a new Big Mac jingle. (Thanks to Mack Collier for the heads up.) They’ve also got podcasts on their main website about “The McDonald’s You Don’t Know”, and investor relations issues. They still have that sorta-corporate ring to them, but a solid effort nonetheless.

• Frank Martin’s local newspaper in Roanoke, VA (The Roanoke Times), and several news outlets in Connie Reece’s hometown of Austin, TX are using accounts on Twitter to send links to local news stories and editorial. All of us rather agreed that newspapers are still a little awkward with their participation, but we all heartily endorsed their effort to embrace this tidal wave of social media.

• Andre Natta’s hyperlocal paper, The Terminal, in Birmingham, AL was the first in its market to use Twitter, and the result was markedly more readers for the paper. They use MySpace to update readers and point them to particular stories and news items. And, they’re about to use Facebook and MySpace to promote an event and drive viewers to their blog for more information. They’re still using email marketing too, with great success.

• Deb Robison used Facebook and MySpace to promote a fashion show called Frock Out! Denver for the Denver Library. Some models and designers from the show were on the sites, too, and helped to spread the word. The success was in getting kids to invite their friends and pass the word – and interestingly, the audience spanned the generations. At the event, they actually had to turn people away! Here’s the link to the video they posted on YouTube to promote the event. The best part? Out of pocket costs were zero (just Deb’s invaluable time), and the exposure got them some great press (Denver Post stories were even picked up by news outlets) and large corporate sponsors for this year’s event. What a success story!

The resounding conclusion for our Plurkshop was that traditional media and new media need to work together in this environment to really have success, and social media can be a powerful asset, indeed. As the landscape continues to change, we all need to remember that the point of social media is in connecting people to other people and giving them ways to reach out into the community. It’s not the technology, it’s a very human desire to connect that will continue to drive folks online.

As Connie is fond of saying, “Technologies change, people don’t”.

Want to join us for a Plurkshop? Get your Plurk persona rolling and look for the thread counter that keeps ticking up! Stay tuned for updates from upcomig Plurkshops.