Adding some rigour to social media measurement

Measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing is a fairly fuzzy activity. Putting a little structure around it can therefore be useful.

There are three main types of measurement you can consider. There's absolute data – data that measures size. There is trend data – data that measures change. And there is comparative data – which you could use for benchmarking.

Absolute data is factual – I might have 5000 Twitter followers, or 37 people might have commented on this blog post. Or perhaps 6000 people viewed my video on YouTube. Or my brand was mentioned 5000 times in forums. Etc etc. Some of this can perhaps be assigned a value in media terms. And while it isn't always easy to assign an appropriate value (what is a Facebook fan worth?) at least you can make a start.

Trend data is also factual – but as you are comparing two sets of data, as you can with tools like Alterian's SM2, the important fact is the change in the data. Thus if there are 10,000 positive mentions of my brand through social media in August that may or may not be good: it's hard to know. But if there were 9000 in July and 12,000 in September I can be pretty confident that I am going in the right direction and that the value of those mentions in September is 125% of the value in July.

And there is comparative data. I might have 12,000 positive brand mentions in September. But if my competitor got 50,000 that month I'm not looking so bright!

We can also separate the results of social media conversations into four areas: views, conversations, actions and effects.

First there are views. Sometimes it's possible to measure the number of people who have seen some of your social media conversations – for instance by measuring visitor numbers to your blog. You won't always be able to measure that – but where you can this may be a helpful metric.

Often these numbers will be small – perhaps too small to be relevant in media terms. But they might not be. If Sony Bravia gets a couple of million views of its ad on YouTube then that's worth something. Probably more in fact than 2 million OTSs on TV.

Then there are conversations. These are simply mentions of your brand or your competitors in various places – forums, blogs, file shares etc. They can be good, bad or indifferent (and you should be measuring that). At its simplest it equates to your PR agency counting the press clips.

Next there are actions. This is when people have done something – taken an action of some kind, perhaps signing up to follow you on Twitter, or responding to a comment you have made in a forum.

Again often the numbers here will be very small – and the real value may not be in terms of media but in terms of the opportunity they bring to engage with brand advocates.

And finally we have effects. This is when you can see that social media activity has had an effect on something else you are doing. For instance, and at its simplest, you could measure the effect (or at least some of the effect) of social media on web traffic by tracking people from appropriate sources such as social networking sites.

Other effects might only be measurable through data analysis, for instance identifying links between social media campaigns and calls to a call centre or online sales.

Of course the effect might well be softer than a measurable and identifable action. It may be a shift in purchase propensity or brand favourability on the part of people exposed to your social media. That's harder to measure although not impossible using standard quantitative research techniques.

So there you have it. A little 3 by 4 matrix that should help you put some rigour into the process of evaluating social media.

Jeremy Swinfen Green, Digital Director
jeremy@mcand.co.uk

Mobile Media Metrics: a good start by the GSMA. But...

The GSMA announced the launch of their mobile media metrics tool, delivered by Comscore, at the London Imax yesterday.

It was certainly a popular event, and massively over-subscribed by all accounts. So I went along ready to be impressed.

Well, to their credit, the GSMA have managed to get the five main UK mobile operators, O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3UK, into one space, sharing usage data to allow robust reach and frequency numbers to be accessed by media planners.

That’s useful. We can see that 16 million people in the UK accessed the web via mobile devices (by which they mean phones – small screens, limited ease of use, but always on and always with you).

And we can see where they go: Facebook, Google, the operators, the BBC… (Actually, when you look at the figures in a bit more depth and examine page views and minutes of use, you find that mobile media is really little more than Facebook Media, but that’s another story.)

And, because GSMA have negotiated a survey of a section of mobile users we can even make some assumptions about the socio-demographics of mobile web site visitors. (Although these are assumptions and I believe will be open to some question.)

But. And it’s a very big but:

There is still no independent data. At the moment all the data comes from the operators. So you buy some media. And the operators will tell you whether or not it has been delivered.

For mobile media to have any credibility (and Michael Smith of the COI was quick to point this out yesterday) we do need to see independent campaign data such as that which is delivered by third party ad servers in “fixed” internet advertising.

Without that (and irrespective of whether you feel the heavy dominance of Facebook is an issue), it will be hard to justify serious spending on mobile media.

Jeremy Swinfen Green, Digital Director