measurement

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Segmenting your “Social Media Marketing” for Success

28 October 2009 in Explanation, social media by Kate | Comments

(Note, this piece assumes that an organization has created a strategic plan for using social media, rather than having someone in a cube in the back office posting to a blog once a week).

I got into an interesting discussion in the comments section of a post about social media success over on B2B Voices with Mark W Schaefer, wherein I came to the conclusion that we were both basically saying the same thing, but looking at the process differently.

It really emphasized the importance of segmenting your overall Program in order to accurately identify success – or failure. This could be your business program, your marketing program, your sales program… in this case it’s the program that you’ve decided to supplement with social media.

It goes without saying that you should be setting measurable goals for your Program, and that they should all point towards money, whether it’s in a corporate setting or a non-profit setting or what have you. The dough may come in different forms, but let’s be honest, without it, you really don’t exist. However, the ability to bring in this money more often than not does not rest on one single mechanism, it rests on many.

All of this may seem blatantly obvious when I say it, but it really surprises me how many times I hear that social media is a failure because it didn’t sell something, or how many times people expect that a Twitter following is directly related to ROI.

The conversation should go more like this:

“The website traffic from the month of October increased by 40%, with 80% of that being from our new Twitter program. Additionally, the number of sales that resulted from our website increased by 30%. We can draw the conclusion that our Twitter program is bringing in valuable traffic to our website, which has always had a great conversion rate.”

Or, perhaps more telling:

“The website traffic from the month of October increased by 40%, with 80% of that being from our new Twitter program. However, the number of sales that resulted from our website didn’t change. Either our Social Media Program is not bringing in valuable website traffic, or our website is not structured in a way to convert viewers to customers.”

This conversation is entirely dependent on the goals you’ve set out for your Social Media Program, and then how they are linked to your other programs. The process looks like this:

Identify overall Program Goals
Identify Components that will go into this Program to achieve those goals
Determine the goals of each separate Component and how each of those goals is connect to your overall Program Goals.

So, if our social media program brought in more qualified leaders to our website (Component Goal), which was restructured to funnel any traffic to a new sales team (Component Goal), who would then convert them to users (Component Goal), we profit (Program Goal). If one of these fails, it doesn’t mean all of them are failures.

Of course, if you set up your social media program to get direct sales, and that’s not happening, then yes, social media is a failure. But just because your sales are not increasing when you start using social media doesn’t categorically mean that your Social Media Program is a failure. If you haven’t touched your website in 5 years and you were never getting sales from it, and you’re hoping to increase website traffic with social media, your problem is probably not social media, it’s your website.

A couple of scenarios to consider:

Social Media Success + Sales Team Success = Program Success

Social Media Success + Website Failure = Program Failure IF the website was in place to convert viewers to buyers

Social Media Success + Website Failure = Program Success IF the website was in place to actually convert without the website (therefore you’re really running two separate programs)

Social Media Success + Customer Service Success = Program Success (this is an implicit one that addresses the Lifetime Value of the Customer, and assuming that with happier customers, you will get continual long-term share-of-wallet from them)

Social Media Failure + Sales Team Success = Program Failure IF social media was meant to bring increased leads to the Sales Team

Social Media Success + Product Failure = Program Failure (more accurately, this would be Business Failure, since nothing can support a lousy product)

I could go on with various scenarios, but I’ll stop….

The focus here is on the Component level and the fact that, far too often, people draw too-direct a connection between a Social Media Program (which, at first glance, can seem quite qualitative) and money coming in the door. By highlighting a series of connections, you’ll be much better equipped to account for success, measure for it, and build an effective overall Program that is illustrated in stages, rather than “If I build a Facebook, when should I expect to see money in the door.”

This is why it’s so important to think strategically about what a social media program really means for your company, and how it fits into a Program that has been well thought out, and is well-measured. Don’t go out and hire social media guru and expect him to move mountains unless you plan on allowing them access to your overall business processes and make darn sure that he is capable of making the above links and laying out effective goals that support your Program.

Wrapping Your Head Around Social Media (slideshare.net)
8 biggest mistakes made in social media (lansner.freedomblogging.com)
Are You Expecting Social Media To Help You Sell? (wealthyways4you.com)

Social media isn’t about numbers, it’s about the value in your numbers

2 August 2009 in Explanation, Random Thoughts by Kate | Comments

I recently had a conversation with someone about numbers and social media. It was not unlike many conversations I’ve had before. I was asked to defend my mere 2,000 Twitter followers against someone else’s 5,000 or so. Doesn’t that make them better at social media? To his credit, he was merely playing with me, and was not necessarily a numbers guy himself, but many people DO base your skill level on this!

My answer is flat out no. I’m a huge proponent of value. Value, value, VALUE. I can’t even say it enough. And that’s why I’m very picky about my own numbers and my company’s numbers when it comes to what that audience means for me and Other Side Group in the long term.

As an example, let’s talk about my Twitter following.

So firstly, I don’t think 2,182 is so paltry in terms of followers. Secondly, I feel that over 75% of my followers (basically, the ones I’m following back) are of high value.

I have not actively sought additional followers since I reached the 300 mark or so. Which means almost everyone past that followed me. Which then means that, as mentioned above, the 75% that were not spam, found me worth following in the first place. I’m offering them something.

What type of qualities in a follower or fan do I define as valuable? Everything that we say is important in social media:

They are seeking value from the people they go to
They engage in discussion and conversation
They seek two-way communications
They are actually listening to the people they are following – in this case me – because of these things.

I follow people that I know will have great ideas, pass along great articles or resources, respond to me when I’m seeking advice or answers, be receptive to my discussion and advice-giving, and want to have “meaningful” online relationships. That’s what I’m here for.

Fred Wilson had a great post about total users versus active users in which he said:

“Your best advocates are always your most active users. So focus on them, make them successful in your service, focus on growing that number, and the non-active problem will take care of itself.”

In my opinion, you should work from the get-go to get users that have the most chance of remaining active and engagement in the long-run, which further lessens you having to “deal” with the problem of non-active users.

A few more numbers that I would be interested in, or that I’d love people or potential clients to be asking me (and that I care about when people tell me their social media “numbers”):

I am regularly “nominated” by at least 5 people each week for #followfriday. Now, some people will scoff at it, but at the very least I feel this is testament to the fact that I am offering them at least some reason to follow me. Yes I have to work at it, but it’s worth it to me because they’re loyal and I know I can go to them when I need to.
When I need answers or advice, I get responses to questions within minutes from people following me. They are engaged in their community (of which I’m a part) and they want to give back. I love this, and I thank them.
When I invited people to the Other Side Group Facebook Page, I could have easily sent it to every one of my 700+ friends and Boom! I would have an envious fan following for a firm our size. But I didn’t. I went through each of those friends and decided who I thought would actually value what we were doing and providing, who might interact with our content, etc. That’s all that matters to me. We’re at 113 fans right now, and it slowly grows every day with new people who are being exposed to our information through those initial fans.
I was able to organize – which means find speakers, find sponsors and promote – an event that brought 150+ attendees in the short span of about three weeks using almost solely my following on Twitter and Facebook. I’m not tooting my horn, I’m highlighting how darn powerful that is! (Thank you guys!).

These are just a few examples, but my biggest question remains. Why don’t people ask more about the value of these networks rather than just the numbers?

We talk a lot in marketing about Reach (R), Frequency (F) and Impact (I). From my observations, too many people are focusing on just the R and F when it comes to social media marketing.

R and F cater to the 0.5 second blasts that people send out, which are usually memorable for perhaps 1 second total by the majority of “listeners.” This can be useful for general brand awareness. But what about the I? The brand IMPACT?

More emphasis needs to be placed on the I and how to achieve that, because that’s really all that matters in the long run. This is the only way to achieve long-term brand loyalty.

I would venture a bet that my 2,000 Twitter followers have way more Impact than someone who went out and aggressively sought followers from anywhere just to get their numbers up, which is what I see time after time again. [I've met so many people at social media networking events that say things like "yeah I just reached 5,000 followers." Great, I say, what's their profile? What are they doing for you? Will they still be around in and paying attention in six months?

This may not matter as an individual (although it may), but it becomes poor strategy (or no strategy!) when it comes to business.

Case in point:

I recently spoke to a company that was marketing the fact that they were "social." What this meant, to them, was listing on their homepage the number of Twitter followers and Facebook fans that they had.

Well, that could be great if it weren't for the fact that the way they GOT those fans was by running a promotion for a giveaway of a prize completely unrelated to their product offering. The "fans" rallied behind the brand for the prize giveaway, and once the prize was given out and the contest ended, the majority of the fans were completely uninterested in the product offering, and those that may have been were left idle because of a lack of sales follow-up on the part of the company.

This is a waste of money and a missed revenue opportunity. Period.

Yet they still tout their numbers on their homepage.....

So let's start talking about value more when you're both increasing your own social media presence and when you're analyzing others.

What do you think about numbers? Are you getting value out of your numbers? Are you wishing you got more value? Have you found a straight numbers approach to social media useful in anyway? We'd love to hear from you!

SXSW: Old Man Nielsen vs New Market Research

16 March 2009 in Conferences & Events by Kate | Comments

“Have traditional surveys and focus groups gone the way of the dodo? Can social media really get to the heart of customer sentiment? This panel will discuss, based on real company experiences, what combination of traditional and social media market research companies need to use to truly understand their customers.”

Panelists:

Daniel Neely, Founder & CEO, Networked Insights
Dave McClure, Troublemaker, Founders Fund
Jim Schroer, Founder, EngageNextGen
Michael J Lambie, Digital Research Director, Nielsen Company

Neely: Social media means more info. What hasn’t changed? You need to attract customers, you need to stay relevant. How do they do that? There’s a whole bunch of jargon out there about the topic of engagement. It matters if they talk about it, if they’re saying something and if they’re impressed. Old Way means a lot of data. The New Way means actionable insights. Data is free, insight is worth a little money, valuable insight is even a little more money and actionable valuable insight is worth a lot. Social media is a very simple thing to understand, but let’s simplify it to a level that allows us to take action.

Tools: Quantcast, Radian6, Kissmetrics, Google (Analytics, Alerts, Search), Whostalkin.com, Scoutlabs, Visible Technologies, Networked Insights, Comscore, Nielsen.

The Old Way required hiring statisticians, running regressions etc. The New Way adds anthropological perspective to the numbers.

McClure: We use primary data to build a picture of the consumer, and try to segment them by engaging them on the web and being in their communities.

Schroer: There’s an economy out there that is fundamentally based on the rates of 30 second TV commercials. There could be an argument made that this is now a house of cards. In social media, people aren’t talking about the same things that are on TV commercials. During the Super Bowl, a lot of the viewings on website went down after the commercials. I want to challenge the system that’s base don TV commercials, and I think the measurement of engagement on the web is more effective.

Question: What are the premium benefits you’d get out of a sentiment-based analysis vs a quantitative-based analysis (for Neely)?

Neely: How do we understand things from a jargon standpoint? How do you look at things from the good and bad, not just the fact that there was a mention? It’s not just about the number of impressions of interactions. When we think about interactions, we can’t just think about post-content. About 15% of people post content. What about all the other 85%? Let’s understand the whole story, and then think about how that effects advertising spend?

Question: What about PR?

Neely: If you understood the right story to tell, and how to tell it, that’s going to be pretty interesting. What about if I can pre-inform that story? PR is about dropping the pebble.

[Pause to ask audience if they trusted their PR firms ability to measure social media..... very low number of hands went up]

Question: What’s the role of listening and the role of vocal minority? How do you accurately measure the vocal minority?

Lambie: When you have the vocal minority, you have to understand what their influence is. There’s a percentage that no one listens to. It’s about influence.
Schroer: I’d love to see the marketers equivalent of a Q-score. We wanted about 10% of people to be negative, and we didn’t care about what happens in the middle.
Neely: I actually use Twitter a lot to understand what the trends are. Back to vocal minority, once you get the place where you can see when people have taken information to another place and started to talk about it, that’s really interesting.
Lambie: I love Get Satisfaction.
McClure: You can really get more of the conversation that’s going on out there on Get Satisfaction.

Question: Have you made any changes based on the way you’ve seen info come to you now?

Schroer: It was all about ratings back then. Now, if you don’t do something remarkable that people talk about (Seth Godin-style), you’re going no where. The way you spark those things can be PR, outrageous ad, etc, but it’s probably not going to be a traditional TV ad.

Question: Any cools tools?

Neely: Some of the stuff at Viviky are putting together are neat. It’s cool it’s coming from an agency. Some of the other listening strategies in terms of free tools. Traackr is really cool.

Question: Have you ever used landing page tasks into offline channels?

Neely: In the convention space, some of the big conventions out there, companies are learning on the fly through social media what was going on and getting feedback real time. People can chat and share stories online, how can we use that? Liquor companies are using this for local marketing, what do people like where?

Question: Where do you propose where we focus our budgets now? Are there enough attractive tools out there to shift budgets?

Neely: Absolutely. You can get to such a level of depth using these tools that you can tell people things like when to place an ad during the day.
Schroer: Just do something that someone talks about. Too much of the creative is just bland. Super Bowl ads: the bland ones Coke did, their website hits went down significantly. Worst commerical in my opinion got a huge increase in hits.
McClure: Sometimes ugly works a lot better than pretty. Sometimes what people don’t understand is that the cost of non-conversion isn’t zero.
Neely: Give people something interesting to talk about.

Question: What’s your golden nugget of wisdom?

Lambie: Focus groups and surveys have their space, but we have to think creatively and critically. Your consumers are always moving, you have to keep up with them. There are a ton of free tools out there to help you stay on top of that.
Neely: Start by using the free tools. When you find that the information is overloading, you need to find relevance. That might be a good time to hire someone to monitor that for you.
Schroer: Now we have a measurement for Word-of-Mouth, you just have to understand that it’s Word-of-Net.

A few good Tweets:

What are your thoughts on measurement? Any favorite tools?

Follow up: Measurement & Strategy

11 September 2008 in From the Field by Kate | Comments

I finally caught up on my RSS reading, and came across a few recent articles that address some of the issues we’ve been dealing with here on the blog, and thought I’d throw them out there.

Measurement: On 26 August, Anya wrote a piece on Measurement.

In an article written for iMedia, Jay Kulkarni wrote a great post on viral metrics and their importance. It offers a few great specifics on measurement techniques.

Conversely, AdAge’s Eric Webber wrote about some of the ambiguities of the new media space and how you just plain can’t measure everything. An equally important argument as far as I’m concerned.

Strategy: On 30 July, I wrote about the importance of strategy in new media marketing.

Reid Carr, also writing for iMedia, wrote about how the focus on tactics and lack of focus on strategy may be contributing to the lack of dollars being put into digital. We agree, although think that people are catching on to the need for strategy, which can only be a good thing for the industry. You can read his post here.

The M word: Measuring success in new media

26 August 2008 in From the Field by Anya | Comments

This is the first of many posts written by Anya, the new principal at Other Side Group.

We’ve been talking a lot about measurement in the new media space lately, and inspired by a great post on ROI on Mashable, I thought I’d take a minute to discuss one of the areas I think is often struggled with in planning a new media program to optimize the ability to measure success and demonstrate results during the course of the project.

Each company or organization should have unique and specific goals it hopes to reach with a new media program, before the program enters the implementation phase. This will not only allow for a targeted approach to the effort with specific tactics tied to the goals the company hopes to achieve, but will also facilitate the proper methods for measurement of success. As with any marketing or public relations program, new media plans will have aspects of ambiguity in measurement, but proper efforts should be made to ensure measurement methods are in place as much as possible, and that expectations are set properly for the kinds of feedback the program can expect.

Like any business initiative, you need to have goals in mind before you begin a new media program. This is not to say that you should have a sales goal or a number of new clients goal, because this may push you into using your new media strategy in a way that screams sales, and that is not what I am arguing. The kind of goals I am referring to are things that involve conversations, corporate reputation or customer relationships. Things like “We want to create a community where we can get technical feedback from users and help to resolve issues” or “We want to establish a channel of open communication between our CEO and our customers” or even “We want to give employees an outlet to comment on industry trends and engage with clients and customers.”

There are of course many other options, each of which have different outcomes and different methods of implementation, but most importantly, they all result in different methods of measurement. If your goal is to reach customers and encourage interaction with the brand, then the number of comments on the site, questions answered, speed of response and customer satisfaction levels become the benchmark for success. A blog for employees and employee interaction could be measured in number of posts, overall traffic and traffic sources, employee satisfaction and retention rates, rate of adoption, interaction between members etc.

The goals of the program determines the measurement possibilities for the program, and because each company and situation is unique, there will never be a cut and dried method for measuring the success of new media efforts. Each program will require its own method of measurement. The important thing I believe is important is that those goals and measurement benchmarks need to be in place before you begin working on your new media program in order to ensure success. For some ideas on what kind of benchmarks can be used, check out a comprehensive list here…

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Segmenting your “Social Media Marketing” for Success

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Social media isn’t about numbers, it’s about the value in your numbers

SXSW: Old Man Nielsen vs New Market Research

Follow up: Measurement & Strategy

The M word: Measuring success in new media

Related articles by Zemanta

Follow Us!

What we’ve been thinking lately

Looking for something?

Old Stuff

Advertising/PR

Business

Entrepreneurship/Small Business

Interesting

Marketing

New Media

Technology

Twittering