Laura Chapman
wadja.com

Trying to come up with a universal social media score, (particularly one based on throwing in a load of numbers and multiplying them together in a magic formula) is like trying to measure happiness, or love:- criteria that work for one person are very unlikely to work for another. Likewise criteria for measuring one company’s social media activity are unlikely to be 100% transferable to another company’s efforts, unless they both share the same goals, objectives, starting point, character, etc.

Set a strategy, set objectives for different stages, define relevant measures for each stage and then move into your benchmark/measure/improve cycle.

Here at Tamar we advise clients to take things one step at a time – if they need to work first on increasing reach, then success can be counted against all those size of audience/traffic measures that we know and love; if they are trying to improve ‘engagement levels’ then look to track key interactions, etc. etc. Fit the measures to the objectives, and fit the objective to current needs and opportunities.

The data suggests that this is a very difficult piece for many to grasp. If companies don’t fundamentally understand the web, they may be measuring the wrong things and scratching their heads as to why they’re not meeting the objectives and failing at achieving any ROI.

My objective with this post is to flesh out that particular piece of the equation. That’s all.

#5 is an execution piece. It’s the collection of data and its subsequent analysis.

#1 is where the measurement methodology (what will we measure, how we will measure it, where will we measure it and why) is actually born. ;)

In the end isn’t that what this all comes down to – not mass audience, but if you’re Social Media efforts are being seen by no-one then it’s pretty clear there is no value there. This is not to suggest that a small audience cannot be highly valuable, especially if you can start to factor engagement in.

His post is worth a read in relation to the ROI discussion because it starts to try to put dollar values to this asset (audience) whereas a lot of the ROI talk in SM is, as Michael points out above, fluff and speculation.

Michael is also right in that it’s still fun to talk about anyway.

You bring up some really good points. I have worked for a few fortune 100 brands; and the question that always comes up from senior management is: what’s the financial investment AND what’s the return?

Easy to say; MUCH harder to do especially for ingredient brands, like my previous employer Intel.

I think all metrics are good to quantify, even the ones that seem fluffy (i.e. increase in RSS/Twitter followers) but the important ones are the metrics that can be directly correlated to some level of business value, however that may be defined.

It’s up to the industry and some smart start up to define these “business value” metrics and create a tool that spit out a quantifiable ROI. Omniture and other similar tools just aren’t smart enough.

Until then, it’s all fluff and speculation but I sure do love to talk about it.

@britopian

I think it’s still a constantly-resuscitated question precisely because most corporated social media endeavers exist somewhere between marketing and customer relations, so they necessarily produce vague outputs. If a drugstore cashier helps me out and improves his company’s brand, he doesn’t make a cent more. If a marketing company interacts with 10 customers on twitter, they stick in in their stats and bill for it! The marketing companies promoting social media are doing it because it’s billable and seems like an obvious good idea, but that doesn’t mean that they have a clue how to measure the impact. So some rock star or basketball icon just tweeted his love of your candy bars…? What does that mean for sales?