Is That An Elephant?
No, I'm not trying to distract you. These first two days of sessions, I couldn't help but feel that there was an elephant in the room with us during the social media sessions. The enthusiasm for social media (and especially Twitter) has been stronger than ever, but we all seem reluctant to dampen that enthusiasm by talking about an uncomfortable fact - very few of us have really found a way to measure social media success. Sure, there are internal metrics for any given platform – Twitter followers, for example – but without something external to tie it to, those are little more than high scores in the social media video game.The B-word
Of course, the default answer is always "branding". Unfortunately, much like "engagement", branding is too often just a distraction, an intangible excuse we use to avoid the fact that we have nothing to measure. Ironically, during a session that had nothing to do with social media, I heard something close to an answer during Q&A. No matter what you think branding is, find a way to measure it. Here are just a few possiblities:- Direct brand mentions
- Links with brand-related anchor text
- Branded search volume
Target a Response
At this morning's keynote, we had a chance to hear from the marketing departments of various Vegas hotels. Like the rest of us, these marketers are learning as they go, trying to figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook to drive real business value. Most of the hotel marketing departments see social media as a direct-response channel, and that's certainly a start. Put out a special offer through social media channels, and you can measure the response. Where there's a measurable response, there's ROI.MGM Grand's marketing head hinted at another possibility – their employees monitor Twitter to spot dissatisfied hotel guests, dispatching staff to help solve the problem. What's the natural next step? Measure this response. How many problems did they intercept? How many were they able to solve? What does solving one customer's problem equal in real dollars? All of these questions can be answered, and from those answers comes tangible value.
Personally I think that most of the value at the moment is in branding and learning more about your customers.
The branding value is in showing that you’re here, out there. Reminding people that you still exist and that you are willing to walk that extra mile to please your customers. Having a lot of followers on twitter might or might not give you a lot of direct sales, but as in everything branding, there is always an effect that really hard to measure – indirect sales. Take this as an example:
John follows a company on twitter that sells blue widgets. Blue widgets is a competitive field and John is not looking to buy any widgets at the moment. His friend Peter is, so he tells John he’s in the market for some blue widgets. John mentions that he can buy them from your company, not mentioning anything about twitter – he just remembers you without really knowing from where. Peter then goes to Google searching for you, find your site and buy you’re product.
The sale then gets credited to the search engines, even though it was really from Twitter. I’m sure this happens a lot more than most people would guess!
The last value in social media is to listen to customers. You get a chance to participate and get feedback for free. You get to listen to unhappy customers and deal with them right there and then, avoiding them running around telling their friends your company sucks.
Yes Kenneth, it does work like you've described but I guess it's also quite fair that the credits (in your examply) partially go to the search engines and not just Twitter. Rand wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago about search / conversion phases (sorry, can't find the link at this time): that article perfectly matches your remark over here! ;-)
Nice post Pete, Avinash has a sensational post on brand measurement that fits nicely with your post:
https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2009/09/brand-measurement-analytics-metrics-branding-campaigns.html
Great link, Tom. Avinash has been an outspoken critic of vague fallback terms like "branding" and "engagement", when they're used to replace metrics. He often makes the point much better than I could, to be honest.
Could it be that the term branding is now actually an excuse to piss around?
I'm in total agreement - the value of replying to tweets, of "participating" in the conversation stream, of having a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, a regular stream of visits from StumbleUpon - these are all difficulty to quantify beyond the direct traffic they send.
Honestly, I think Facebook Connect wants to try to solve this by being a universal tracking system, but it still has a ways to go.
Great topic - looking forward to hearing what others have implemented.
Any referrer can be measured by the channel vs. average behavior.
Tracking Social Media is not that much different from measuring search--you have the same on-site criteria that are established in web-analytics regardless of source. There are some things that social media offers like a diminsion of sentiment and entropy is a larger factor, but SM is very trackable.
In terms of value, I think that Social Media ROI is more measurable /valuable, when it is focused.
LinkedIn has the right idea. It is a Social Network focused solely on business. As a result, I tend to see more focused, professional activity and collaboration there, than on FaceBook. It has its purpose, and fulfills it.
Not to say that Twitter and Facebook don't have value.Facebook's feed just distracts from any Marketing you might be doing. If the Don needs that customer in Mafia Wars, he's headed to ice Vinny, not book a hotel reservation.
Twitbots keep me so busy purging my followers, that it makes it hard for me to find valuable new people to follow (they solved a portion of this with lists).
All that to say this: Social Media is made for people with extreme ADD. Until they figure out a way to slow down(yes, I said slooooow dowwwn) the speed of communication, and increase the quality of messages in the feed, it is going to be hard to push through an effective marketing message using this kind of media.
Either that, or MGM needs to hire Zynga to code a HotelVille app.
It's funny, but I've actually gotten more direct business value from Twitter than LinkedIn. My theory is that it's because of how Twitter grays the line between business and personal - it's easier to get to know people and connect to influencers. Any request on LinkedIn has a perceived obligation (it's a business request), so it tends to meet with more resistance.
For me, I can definitely track specific relationships that have come from Twitter and the value of those relationships, but I have to admit that it's difficult to put a direct metric against that. The amount of traffic and links I've driven from Twitter is tiny compared to the value I've gotten from those specific relationships. Of course, none of that value is reflected in follower count or any internal Twitter back-pat metric.
Twitter is an interesting beast. It is one of the few places where "engagement" is quantitative: replies, retweets and references (the Three Rs).
Any twitter campaign can be measured by the percentage of your Reach (2nd degree followers) that engage in one of the Three Rs.
This has become an interesting topic for us, as we've seen numerous instances for our clients of LinkedIn traffic providing the highest quality in terms of metrics - new visitors, time on site, pages viewed, bounces, pathways, etc. Whereas Twitter has consistently shown the lowest quality (by those same metrics).
HOWEVER, there is no evidence that either create a better or worse relationship - just that visitors from those sources behave differently.
To echo some of the sentiments above and below this comment, it is a little half-ass to fallback on the engagement/branding dodge, but its also short-sighted to say "if you can't count it, it doesn't count".
PS - Thanks Dr. Pete - I was always a fan of the childrens story "the emperors new clothes". I appreciate your retelling of it ;)
I should clarify that my comment about Twitter is just what's worked for me. For my business, industry, and personal style, it's been a better fit for me than LinkedIn. I've heard success stories across all of the major social media sites and I've heard people who have given up and declared them all a failure. Like just about anything, what you get out of social media depends a lot on what you put into it. Also agreed that you shouldn't just up and quit because you can't precisely quantify ROI. I think you have to find a balance - push forward and innovate but be aware of metrics and ROI and always push yourself toward the next level. Build on what works and try to do it a little better every day.
Great article! I especially like this statement,
"...branding is too often just a distraction, an intangible excuse we use to avoid the fact that we have nothing to measure."
Marketing up until the internet appeared had always been very difficult to track.
Pretend you bought some premium air time on a big network to showcase your new product. Your ad runs 14 times over 14 nights on the same show/channel. Sales of your product increase by a healthy percent during this ad campaign. Of course it is in the marketers best interest to conclude that the sales increase was a direct result of the added marketing expenditures, but how sure can the marketer (or anyone else for that matter) be of the true cause of the sales increase? Maybe someone who bought your product was convinced to make the purchase after seeing the commercial the first night the ad ran. This same customer then saw the same commercial the next 13 nights even though it only took one night of the ad to make this particular sale. Try applying similar situations to the thousands of people who saw the ad and you have yourself an enormous amount of data to digest and analyze.
Social Media is much the same as the above traditional marketing situation. Who is to say that someone made a purchase entirely based on reading a tweet? Maybe the customer already had their mind made up and was going to purchase this product, the tweet that triggered the sale served only as a reminder that the product is available and that they still need to purchase this product.
One major difference between traditional marketing and SMM is barrier to entry. Having a cool TV commercial in and of itself conveys a form of legitimacy to the company running the commercial. Producing and airing a commercial is very expensive which keeps the fly by night companies mostly off the air. Twitter/Facebook/Myspace/randomcookiecuttersite are all free to use which means everyone who has a business thinks the business should have some sort of social media participation even if they are selling walking sticks for the blind.
Personally I'm looking forward to the impending web 2.0 crash.
Well said edobb. There is no doubt numerous interactions impact a consumer's purchase. No matter how many deoderant commercials I see, I will buy Speed Stick. Why? Dad bought and buys Speed Stick.
Integrated mrkt plans are our best bet. If you skip on SM you are skipping an opportunity and as you say a low cost entry.
No doubt the internet has knocked down barriers to entry creating to competition. And doesn't competition help us build a better mouse trap?
Definitely an interesting topic. Dr Pete, how would you recommend actually measuring this stuff though, from an ROI perspective?
Certainly using GA to capture visits and conversions is one way, but what about everything else that comes with social media marketing?
In your post you ask "What does solving one customer's problem equal in real dollars?"
Any ideas on how to come up with a number on it?
I'm as much of an evangelist for marketing measurement as any, but it seems to me that social media marketing still has a longgg way to go before it will be as measurable as SEO or SEM.
agreed, a lot depends on the actual brand in question too. Regardless of what some "experts" tell us there are some industries and therefore brands that just do not work with social media
Do you have an example of a brand, or industry, that social media can't work for?
The last time I checked every brand has customers (and therefore people who could be on social media).
Yes, although when I say that they dont work with social media that doesnt mean that they never will, just that they dont at the moment.
Product with very little personal interest levels within markets that have people who have very little interest outside of working their fields. For example I was working with a manufacturer of loft ladders last year, this is not really an area that people show enough of an interest in to be bothered with outside of work. This was added to because the target buying market were not very web savvy and they were still struggling to convince people to order online rather than over the phone because of classic 90’s reasons like “I know its done when I can speak to someone” or “I feel safer giving card details over the phone”.
These type of industries exist still and there are still a lot of people who don’t like to buy online, these people are even further away from embracing social media than buying online and because of the demographic that makes up this kind of person they all tend to sit within similar industries (which I seem to be quite heavily involved with).
Generally (although not always the case) B2B social media use is less effective because people would not want to join a facebook group (for example) that was only work related. People don’t want their drunk photos on a group which is promoting how to comply with the latest working for height regulations nor do they want bothering at home by such things.
A company renting skips, supplier of loft ladders, products that are more of a requirement than a desire.
A lot of generalisation I know but I hope it gets the point across, if anyone wants any more details/specifics or has any ideas you know where to find me!
I know this answer will bug the purists, but I think you just need to start with something. Let's say that you're trying to measure engagement and, within your niche, you decide that Time On Site would be one way to gauge this. Now, there are a ton of posts about why ToS is a poor measure, but it's a start. Start measuring, dig deep (segment), and see what happens. If the measure isn't working out, adjust. Sooner or later, you're going to find a combination that reveals something interesting, and you'll be on your way to useful metrics.
True, although if you are managing a campaign on behalf of another and need to report on these things they will become inpatient, ironically they will also want to regularly see reports on this metric and even though they will insist that the measure is not useful they will question when it drops.
I think I might sometimes come across as the most negative person in the world on here but hopefully I am providing balance!
Thanks Dr. Pete, it will certainly take some creativity and guess and check to figure out what metrics are most relevant to social network traffic. And I would assume it is industry dependent as well..
ROI analysis on social media marketing is fundamental to the survival of the discipline. Companies are spending huge resources on twitter, facebook, blogging etc. but they won't continue to do this in the long term unless they can get measurable metrics on the impact of these efforts on their business.
At youcalc we have implemented a number of social media ROI analytics solutions for customers. See this example with a dashboard that tracks activity levels on twitter, technorati, digg, etc. and charts that against lead generation levels in salesforce.com, to answer simple questions like: does more mentions on twitter lead to more customer leads or are we just creating worthless buzz?
See/try the dashboard here: https://www.youcalc.com/apps/1236336973605
There is a good short discussion on LinkedIn recently about this here:
What metrics do you use to determined ROI from social media marketing?
Interesting discussion. One of the things that bothered me a bit hearing from the Las Vegas hotel marketers was that many of them hadn't really budgeted for social media. They were all excited that Facebook and Twitter were group efforts, with many employees involved (which is great in theory), but what's exciting and new for those employees now is just going to feel like work later. Social media takes time and if you don't think that equates to cost, you're fooling yourself.
Nice article and comments. To me, this is the number one priority of next generation social media.
The philosophy of Twitter to create followers and measure that one metric is what I think has most of us trying to fit a square peg (ROI) into a round hole (mindless following).
Twitter's addition of new tools like Lists create new possibilities. If there were a measuring tool that could pump Twitter activity into an analytics program, imagine the possibilities of measurement. But I don't think that is Twitter's business model. So we may struggle with this tool for a while.
I do like that the search engines are getting more involved in indexing this content though, including lists. Its this increased interest from Google and Bing that may end up holding the key to our social media salvation.
Is the telephone ROI unmeasurable?
That was the other point Lee made - we don't ask about the ROI of things like email or the phone, and Twitter is a communications platform. On the other hand, we do ask about the ROI of any given use of these platforms. As soon as you start a telemarketing or email campaign, then your efforts become very measurable.
Well, its wonderful to see good and updated coverage for the event as it helps a lot for ppl like us who cannot attend while sitting in some other country. Thanks for sharing and writing.
Great post and enjoyed the comments as well. Obviously, we are learning as we go forward here on how and what to measure. Seems that if there is no budget, there should be no expectations on ROI? I agree that you measure something. It may change over time, as you continue to learn. But, the key is to have a closed loop and what you measure will drive next steps. Remember the old axiom of what gets measured, gets managed.
Thank you for the information. One thing that will always be difficult to measure is the ROI of Social Media.
No matter how many numbers we write down, how many calculations we do, it'll always be too dynamic for us to measure accurately, at least. But this puts a lot into perspective, thank you.
Twitter and facebook are good ways of social media with the amount of members subscibed you are bound to gather some interest along the way!
but nothing is certain we always take a risk on the ROI side
great article - important to find the ROI of any investment we make
Of course we need to measure wherever we can.
Unfortunatly, most are trying to measure social media by follower counts. It's like trying to measure your whether to invest in telephones by how many numbers are in your phone book.
This technology is so much more than a medium. It allows us to LISTEN and then really have a conversation. The metrics to watch are how many people you've helped.
People at board level often still like to use the follower counts, I think that at a certain level social media is a bit of an ego stroker
Nice to see you over here, Warren. Unfortunately, as humbled hinted below, I think follower count is a pretty good measure of something: the account holder's ego. I think the trick is that you have to tie Twitter to something external. Internal metrics, like follower count or how many lists you're on are just a way of keeping you hooked on Twitter. We have to tie it back to other metrics and then tie those metrics to dollars.
I couldn't think of a more appropriate discussion then Social Media Measurement. I went to SMX East and came away with the same feeling. Everyone has great ideas and thoughts on how to utilize Social Media, but very few if any have a solid way to measure performance. I think this topic is something that needs to be more widely discussed, and assessed. Look forward to hearing what everyone has to say about it here.
yeah i got some points in your article are favorable and some unfavorable. At this twitter is getting stronger social platform rather other than and it is giving very positve response.branding is very essential for long term business solution whether you are involving any types of business conventional or internet.
once business got branded success is sure for it.
I have to admit that I left out something Lee Odden said. He actually felt that asking about ROI for Twitter wasn't an appropriate question - to him, Twitter is a platform, much like email (a means to an end, that is, not an end itself). I understand his point - no one asks if email as a whole is worth the investment. We simply accept the value of the platform at this point.
Similarly, maybe you can't look at social media as whole and say "Is this worth it?" The effects are often indirect or complementary to other marketing. On the other hand, much like email, you can measure the impact of any given effort. We may not measure the ROI of email as a whole, but we do measure the ROI of email marketing campaigns, newsletters, buying email lists, etc. We can also measure the ROI of any targeted effort on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Great post, Dr.Pete
We just had a conversation with clients yesterday regarding social media.
In my mind these are 3 most important things about social media.
1. Monitor and maintain reputation
2. Customer interaction and feedback
3. Drive traffic and sales
However, how to measure the success of social media had bothered me for quite a while, because the real figures(sales,ROI.etc) has to be provided after all.
I would be desperate to know if anyone finds a way to measure it quite accurately.
I really like what MGM is doing! It is without a doubt hard to measure Social Media when you consider the time it takes to maintain a good twitter, facebook flickr account.
Like Dr. Pete said, there's ways to measure ROI on social media - just find a comparison.
Oh and good ROI on facebook doesn't equate to how many "likes" you have for a wall post or link....
The like button on facebook is the online equivalant to the head nood to someone on the street :)
You should definitely check out Oliver Blanchard's Basics of Social Media ROI slideshare - https://www.slideshare.net/thebrandbuilder/olivier-blanchard-basics-of-social-media-roi
It opened my eyes.
The challenge for me is determining when to measure. If you measure Day 1 you probably say it's not worthwhile, if you wait until day 365 if it wasn't worthwhile you wasted a lot of time. Thoughts?
(hopefully this makes sense)
Thanks for keeping your readers informed! The ideas that come out of events like Pubcon are so useful! Wish I could have gone this year!
There are a lot of affordable search engine optimization services tantamoung of the same aid given by social medias to increase page rank & website traffic. Dude, this entry is nicely done. Thanks for the info though.
Great conversation. I do believe that branding has an extremely valuable role in social media. A company first needs to decide what is important for them to measure. Is it ROI or is it engagement. Obviously, ROI is more difficult, which is why the convo is so interesting.
Here's a great resource I read a while back that I thnk is very helpful:
https://businessesgrow.com/2009/07/20/the-biggest-lie-in-social-media-marketing/
Nice read, it is hard to quantify and I think that reading the post on last click below
https://www.seomoz.org/ugc/google-analytics-alternatives-measuring-beyond-last-click-wins
adds a bit of value if you read it straight after this one