Wiring In Social Media Measurement

Businesses that struggle the most with measuring social media are the ones that struggle with measurement, period.

Social media isn’t harder to measure than any other area of business. It’s harder to prove causality, but then again, direct and independent causality is awfully hard to prove for any singular event that impacts a sale. Sure, you can track your direct response codes all you want, but you can’t tell me definitively that the advertising you did, or the relationship that person had with Bob the Sales Guy, or the article than ran in the New York Times didn’t also have an effect on that eventual decision.

But I digress. Back to the point.

What Are You Measuring Now?

My sense is that if you’re a company that’s in a measurement frame of mind in the first place, you’ve managed to measure and quantify (or qualify) something that you’re doing. For instance:

• What’s the conversion rate of your e-newsletter subscribers to actual prospects or sales?
• What’s your resolution time on customer service calls?
• What’s the cost of having a human resources department?
• What percentage of your customers renew after the second purchase?
• How do you calculate your customer satisfaction, and what is it currently?
• What return do you get on your advertising dollars, direct or implied (and which is it)?
• How do you justify your investment in your IT department and infrastructure?
• What is your return on training materials or continuing education for your employees?

Guessing that the last two might have thrown you a bit, but these are legitimate measurements, too, aren’t they? We often term measurement as only having value when it relates to dollars in, but I’d venture to say that measuring (and justifying) dollars out is important. After all, if you know your stuff about the actual calculation of ROI, you’ll agree completely.

If, however, you don’t have an answer for anything above or anything that looks like those things, you probably need to improve the practice of your measurement to start with.

Measurement Needs Infrastructure

I’m going to put this simply. If you’re not already rigorously applying measurement (i.e. justification) standards to other areas of your business – on both the cost and revenue side – you can stop blustering about needing measurements for social media specifically. Why? Because you’re not equipped, and you don’t have a discipline of measurement upon which to build.

Measuring things properly takes, at least:

• Time: In terms of man hours to actually do the gathering of data and the further analysis of it, over a period of time that can actually provide context and account for trends and anomalies.
• Tools: The ability to capture, aggregate, and correlate the data you wish to measure, whether that’s a spreadsheet or a more complex software application.
• Humans: One metric alone means little. You need people to draw relationships and correlations between the data points that indicate progress toward the goals you’ve set. Few machines alone are capable of such insights and conclusions. Those people also need to report back their findings and offer recommendations for acting on them.

It’s staggering to see how many companies are demanding measurements and some mysterious definition of ROI for social media that can’t even tell you their conversion rate on various website properties, or the retention rate for their customers. Please stop demanding something you’re not prepared to do as a matter of business, and as a cop-out for not implementing a strategy that is unfamiliar to you.

Start With What You Know

You might think you need to develop and invent a whole new set of metrics to illustrate how social media impacts your business. Sometimes, that might be true or valuable, because there are things we can measure now that we couldn’t measure easily before. For example, I’m particularly bullish on the potential for metrics like Share of Conversation.

However, if measurement of the new stuff confounds you, start with what you know. Figure out how social media activities and participation impacts and influences the metrics you already use.

For instance, when you launch your blog, do your email newsletter subscriptions go up? If you know the average conversion rate of those subscribers (and perhaps their average value as a customer), you’ll be able to correlate the increase in your blog awareness to those subscriptions. Are they the only driver? No. Can you map the two together over time and see if they rise proportionally to demonstrate impact? Absolutely.

If your call center costs you $5 per incoming issue and you deploy a DIY YouTube help series or a Twitter team to triage in the social media realm, watch your daily call volume. Does it drop over a 30 day period in conjunction with those efforts? How much time and manpower does that Twitter team or video series cost you overall? Line up that investment against the drop in call volume by $5 per call, and see if you end up in the red or in the black.

It Doesn’t Have To Hurt

Measurement doesn’t have to be arduous and painful. It should be something you can stream into your daily or weekly processes. Remember that the goal isn’t the measurement itself, but the insights you get out of doing it. Keep it straightforward, simple, and utterly tied back to the goals you’ve set for yourself. (Start over here if you need help setting measurable objectives).

Make measurement a part of each department or function’s leadership. Put it in terms they’re familiar with. And at least to start with, measure social media against and along with the things you’re already tracking. See whether it has an impact either way.

And above all, be sure that you’re building a discipline of measurement and accountability in your business before you blame the medium itself for being immeasurable.

There’s loads of opportunity to evaluate your efforts, if it’s a mindset you’re willing to take.

Over to you. Agree? Disagree? I’m here to listen.

Social Media Ebooks You May Have Missed

Because I’m not always stellar about updating some of the other pages of my blog, I wanted to collect the ebooks I’ve written all in one place, so you can have at them if you need them, and so I have an easy place to point folks to when they ask. I’m hoping one or two are useful for you.

In the redesign of the blog (soon!) these will be better organized, but for now, here are the ones I’ve compiled in the last year or so. They’re all free, and hopefully helpful. Let me know what you think.

Getting a Foothold in Social Media

A rundown of some of the basic, fundamental elements of building a social media plan, especially directed at smaller and medium-sized businesses, but certainly consistent for companies of any size. Click here to download the PDF.

The Social Media Starter Kit

Here, we cover some of the most popular social media tools and technologies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogging, as well as some productivity and supporting tools to make social media task management easier and more fluid. Click here to download the PDF.

Building a Social Media Team

If you’re considering deploying a team to tackle your social media efforts, have a look here. We’ll discuss why you might need a team, how to assemble one, roles and responsibilities, and more. The ebook includes a look inside Humana’s social media “Chamber Of Commerce” and how their interdisciplinary team is driving social media efforts at their company. Click here to download the PDF.

Social Media Time Management

If you’re struggling with information overload and how to sort your priorities in social media, this ebook will give you some practical, actionable ideas for managing the firehose. Includes some thoughts on resource allocation and time commitments for social media strategies inside a business, as well as 9 strategies for keeping the social media monster manageable. Click here to download the PDF.

Tools Can Be Strategic

No, it’s not all about the tools. If, by “it”, you mean the Big Ultimate Goal of All of This Stuff and Why We’re Doing It In the First Place. I don’t think we need to debate that point any further, do we?

But it’s important to point out, as a bookend, that tools can be strategic, or at least part of developing sound strategy.

Blogging can be a strategy that helps you reach a larger goal of awareness or reach or idea testing or personal exploration or whatever. Twitter can be a viable part of a distribution network strategy or engaging the community you have in other places. You can vet its adoption or value for your audience, test ideas, track its usefulness as a traffic driver for your website.

For many companies, forays into social media include testing and experimenting with the mechanisms that are available, and let’s face it, familiar and comfortable. And it’s hard to ask an established business to commit to a full-blown social media strategic plan if they can’t kick the tires on a few of the tools to see how they might work (or not).

What’s important is that the company take the approach of testing and seeking tangible experiences that might relate to larger goals. That help provide some experience, some evidence, some immersion. A starting point.

As my friend Tamsen says, it’s the why that matters, not the what. If the mechanical experiments help shed some light on what the bigger strategy should look like – the why – I think that’s an okay thing indeed.

The trouble starts when we forget to connect the dots, make presence on a tool the goal in itself, and stop at “hey, look, Facebook!”

Having a strategy isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about mapping a process to try and find them, and constantly checking progress and adjusting along the way. Sometimes, tinkering with a tool or two can be just the way to do that.

See the difference?

image by comedy_nose

Hiring For Social Media: What I’d Look For

In my previous posts on, I pointed out some good and some bad on the social media job front. A few asked what I thought social media jobs should look like, so I’ll do my best. But I’m not going to write this like a typical job description, because I think the content is more important than the format.

Social media-exclusive jobs are okay for now, as foundation building for companies needing to learn the ins and outs, understand intent and strategy, and educate their internal folks. But eventually, these kinds of jobs will fall by the wayside (or at least evolve) when social media becomes part of each and every role in one way or another, perhaps with specialists that have particular experience in application of the tools within their roles. (Think of it this way: we don’t have email managers that do nothing but. The *use* of email and digital stuff touches every role, whether it’s inward or outward facing).

Attributes

In my experience, the folks who grok social media best have a lot of attributes in common:

Curiosity: The desire to explore new ideas, in detail, and without specific direction to do so. Curiosity about the intersection of human interactions and technology is a specific aspect that’s helpful, and a passion for the potential of the work and the organization’s purpose is key to instilling that in others, both internally and externally.

Innovation: Ignore the buzzy nature of this word for a moment and concentrate on what it really means: the introduction of something new. Social media implementation requires new approaches to existing processes, both internally and externally, including communication, strategy, execution, measurement, reporting, and training. (This needs to be carefully balanced with realism and pragmatism, too, but I’d rather rein someone in than have to prod them forward.)

Motivation: Folks thriving in social media jobs are self-starters, often capable of creating clarity from a bit of chaos, and devising their own marching orders without constant direction or specific instructions. If you can instill and nurture this in others, too, so much the better.

Collaboration: “That’s not my job” and “get out of my sandbox” don’t play well in these kinds of roles. They’re far too new to be that rigid, and they definitely need cooperation and work with others across the organization.

Translation: In many companies right now, we need people that have the patience and clarity of explanation to teach others about the impact of the social web, and who work well across departments within a corporate culture. These roles, most critically, need to know how to work and educate across silos, in the terms that make sense to the relevant colleagues.

Humility: The goal here is to elevate the entire company and your colleagues as contributing, valuable members of the community and leaders in the industry. Not you and your “personal brand”.

Diplomacy: Social media roles are today’s change agents. If you expect instant sea change inside your company without a lot of legwork, communication, negotiation, discussion, education, and trial and error, this job is NOT for you. And the outside community will present challenges to you; you need to be able to handle them with patience and tact. It’s a balance of emotional intelligence here.

Connectivity and Awareness: This is a people job, inside and out (and I don’t just mean community roles). You need to be able to talk to people, work with them, socialize with them, connect with them in multiple places. Understand how the network and the people in it need you (and don’t), and how all of those interactions work together to encourage more, deeper, and better connections that ultimately elevate the quality of your work and company.

Expertise

Business Process/Planning and Analysis: From the mid level on up, you want someone who understands financial frameworks for profit and loss, strategic and long range planning (including how to write goals and objectives), and how to map out execution at a tactical level. The key here is the ability to think at a global company level, not within a silo, and not in a linear fashion.

Social Media Anthropology & Participation: If you have someone spearheading social media, I feel pretty strongly that they need to be using it themselves in order to fully understand its implications and unique culture. Yes, that means familiarity with the most widely known tools and technologies, and some of the most consistent and popular applications (for better and for worse) of same, and interest and observation of what’s new on the scene (without the tendency to chase everything new because it is). Academic knowledge is good, applied is even better.

Hedgehog Management: Social media programs that are well thought out have lots of moving parts to manage and drive. People who excel at social media jobs can tackle projects that span multiple networks or areas, and keep all the pieces moving toward a bigger, crystal clear goal (or in Jim Collins’ terms, Hedgehog Concept).

Customer or Client Service: Whether it’s a formal title or not, you really want someone who has experience communicating with customers directly, and fostering those relationships in order to meet their business goals. The most powerful bit of social media is in mobilizing those relationships.

Written Communication Skills: Yep. Sorry, folks. I think this one is really imperative. So much communication and engagement online is in the form of written communication. If you can’t write coherently and professionally, you’re going to struggle. On this note, I also think a lot of social media positions will and should include elements of content marketing, which means that the ability to create and contribute solid content is key.

Social Media Roles And Responsibilities

Again, let me say that I’m writing this from the POV of a job that’s heavily or exclusively social media, and I don’t think these jobs will exist like this forever. And this is a broad, sweeping list that’s not meant to tie to any one job description (though I’m quite certain I have experience bias), but instead give you things to consider if you’re in need of a role like this in your company. A few things that might fall under this umbrella:

• Establish and use listening platforms to gauge the health of the brand online, and potential for participating in new communities
• Build outreach initiatives outside of sales or marketing goals to give our brand a personality and voice within the industry and the communities we care about
• Engage the community actively and responsively, both in relevant outpost communities and existing resident channels (like brand communities), and teach and empower team members to do the same, with consistency and clarity
• Build training programs to help other areas of the company learn and tap the potential of social media for their roles
• Collaborate on internal communication programs to inform and educate around social media initiatives and their broader implications
• Create and facilitate content in multiple media to further engagement goals, both internally and externally, and contribute resources and expertise to prospective and existing community members
• Consume, curate, and share relevant, interesting industry information and content with internal and external communities.
• Understand and observe the parallels and implications of other online activities, including web analytics, email, and search
• Communicate and collaborate on how social media activities impact other business operations, including customer support, human resources, product development, sales and business development, and translate online community and social learnings into business insights
• Establish relevant metrics (new or existing) to map the impact of social media activities in both a qualitative and quantitative fashion, and amend strategies based on learnings and patterns

Reporting wise, I’d put this position under whomever is charged with driving customer experience and a sustainable, positive company presence through online channels, and whatever business function is being most heavily supported by these initiatives. That might be someone in PR, marketing, customer service, client or donor relations, even product management. It needs, in whatever case, to report in to someone who gets the importance and potential of this, even if they don’t necessarily understand the “how”.

Your Turn

There’s no way my list can be exhaustive, nor can it possibly cover every subtlety and nuance of individual positions based on unique business needs. I’m painting with a broad brush, with the hope that it gets the gears turning for all of us to think critically about how these positions fit into business, from multiple perspectives.

So I need to hear from you! What’s missing? What would you included or have you included in your job descriptions? What have you seen that articulates the need for these jobs well? I can’t wait for you to weigh in. Comments are yours.

Vacation Can Be Digital, Too

I’m going on vacation this week, which has been a little while coming and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

But I’ve been a bit surprised by the number of people who are encouraging me (some flat-out lecturing me) to “unplug”. Turn the phone and computer off and go un-digital for the week.

While that may be some people’s idea of utter relaxation, it’s not necessarily mine, and being plugged in to me doesn’t necessarily beget stress. Because it’s not the connections that are stressful, it’s the obligations and deadlines and expected response times that make it hard during the “on” working hours.

Being completely disconnected is actually uncomfortable to me. And it’s not because of some irrational nerdy need (ok, maybe a little), but it’s because my friendships aren’t bound by geography and time zones anymore. My digital connections are often what helps me keep in touch with the people that matter most to me since I don’t have the good fortune to see them often in person.

My computer gives me more than just Twitter, too. It’s a repository for my thoughts and musings, and sometimes in places I don’t (gasp) make public. It’s how I keep photos and videos of my adorable daughter close at hand and easily shareable. It’s the home for Skype which keeps me connected with friends and family all over the country not because I have to, but because I want to. It’s home to my iTunes library, and music goes everywhere with me.

There’s one more bit here that’s really important: I love what I do. Working for me isn’t torture. I’m inspired by my work and motivated to do it every day, because I care about it. Because I want to change things for the better, share my ideas, and learn from others. Sometimes, being plugged in is exactly where I want to be. Thinking and creating and building things. It’s what I do.

So when I’m on vacation, the freedom isn’t in being unplugged. It’s that I get to follow my own whims, my own schedule, and connect as much or as little as I want to because the mood strikes me (not because I’ve got a deadline looming or the expectation of a 3-hour email response time). The relief is in taking back a little control over my own schedule and dictating my own interruptions, following my muses more freely perhaps, but it’s got nothing to do with being digital or not.

So I’m going to relish the time with my Dad, soak up the sun on the boat and on the lake, and breathe lots of (hot) summer air. I’m going to laugh and run around with my kid and take lots of pictures (or not) and swim and draw on the sidewalk in chalk. I’m going to grill things and sip wine and sleep in a bed whose sheets I don’t have to wash.

And you’ll probably still see a tweet or two. And the blog will still get a post or three. And yes, I’ll even peek at my email once in a while to keep my finger on the pulse of what awaits me upon my return, or because inspiration strikes.

So I’ll still be on vacation. I’ll be relaxed and recharghing, even if it comes with a plugged-in moment or three. And I’ll enjoy every minute of it. See you in a week.

photo credit: m o d e