Moving Beyond Counts & Traffic – Social Media Measurement That Works

Lots of interesting research coming out on Social Media recently. We take note because the results and conclusions continue to demonstrate that measurement remains a high priority for executives, but what is delivered is not meeting their needs. Let’s take a look at some recent examples of companies surveyed about their social media efforts from a measurement point of view.

First a study from White Horse of 104 companies using social media shows us that when companies try to measure the success of their social media efforts, that very few (less than 15%) are able to get to an ROI for their work. They continue to use traffic and participation (we put that in our behavior metrics) to demonstrate success.

Here is another study which demonstrates a similar point, that companies are using social media traffic and behavior metrics as a measurement of success. This study completed by King Fish Media in June 2010 has great information; unfortunately, it reveals that while many companies say that they have a social media strategy in place they don’t understand how to measure its results.

Perhaps it is the way the research is presented versus the actual question asked, but when you read the measurements used for value they are not representing economic value in most cases. Rather, marketers and others measuring social media continue to focus on representing traffic as some sort of proxy for value. Worse, many still believe that the number of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook is a valuable metric to use to demonstrate value. They couldn’t be more wrong…

Even the famed Guy Kawasaki is promoting an idea that the more followers the better during a TweetChat on MarketingProfs…but his perspective is the larger the audience from a sheer numbers perspective the better your results will be. In our experience, that is just not true. We see that the more QUALIFIED followers you have, the better your results MIGHT be.Why? Because the value of a follower is zero until they do something that brings value to the organization. If all they are doing is following and never taking action, can you assign a value to them? We think not. Have you analyzed your followers? How many are customers? How many are prospects? How many are competitors? (How many have followed your account to simply build their own counts through an auto-follow?)

So where does all this lead? Well, if you are attending theiStrategy meeting in Chicago on September 15-16, we’ll be there to address this issue. I’ll be presenting this topic on the morning of the 16th to the attendees.

I’ll demonstrate a stronger methodology for using a more integrated approach to your social media efforts which allows you to focus only on the metrics that really matter… those that lead to economic value for your organization.

For those of you who cannot attend, the presentation will be added to our social media resource center after the meeting ends. For those of you who are attending, please bring your questions!

Back to the blog

Social Media: Whose Brand Is It? A Contrarian View

This week’s Fortune Magazine has a very interesting article in its career section titled “Building Your Brand (and keeping your job)” by Jost Hyatt. Are you a senior level marketer in an company that is moving quickly into social media? If so, this article should be on your critical reading list. Here’s why (excerpted from the article):

“When Monty joined Ford, he brought with him 3,500 Twitter followers; he now counts 41,000, conceding that many of those came with the big blue oval logo that now accompanies his tweets.”

“And he’s kept his Twitter handle as @scottmonty rather than adding the Ford brand. ‘I was Scott Monty before I came to Ford, and I’ll be Scott Monty after I leave Ford,’ he says.”

And he is absolutely correct… when he leaves Ford, he takes all the brand equity from his social media efforts with him. Well, maybe not all but certainly a lot.  This is not a criticism of Scott in any way, just a social media tactic that is going to back fire with a lot of companies as the economy gets better and people start changing companies again.

As we wrote in an earlier blog post, Walking Out the Door with the Twitter Password, organizations must have a plan for social media and turnover of employees. But we didn’t go in to the brand equity and ownership issue. So with the above article as an example, here are our thoughts.

Contrary to popular opinion that brands are owned by everyone in the world of social media and that organizations should give up control, we argue that this advice results in companies giving away valuable assets. The number one objective for using social media from a brand perspective should be to build the importance of the brand in the audience’s thoughts. That’s why marketers use advertising to build awareness, coupons to build trial use, and consistency in branding to build a relationship with consumers. In B2B terms, it’s still about awareness but the relationship factor becomes even more important. With all of the money spent by marketers to build their brands, enhance them, and promote them, why would they let the value slip away as someone walks out the door for a new position? But with the social media tactics promoted and utilized by so many, this is exactly what companies are doing.

“People forget that they are always representing their companies… If you send a tweet that says ‘My Boss sucks,’ you have to be aware of what could happen.” – Lucia Erwin, fomrerly H-P’s sr. director of strategic workforce planning

And here’s an example of how personal accounts acting as corporate accounts can back fire from the article:

“Amy D. was a social-networking expert at a marketing firm. She was just ‘letting out some frustration’ last year when she issued a tweet noting the irony that she was editing a presentation about social media for her boss who didn’t use it. She got fired shortly thereafter for violating a new communications policy.”

(Amy probably wasn’t a real social networking expert because that was such a rookie mistake. But that is another story about our industry all together…)

So what is a company to do? Well, for one rethink this tactic. Think about the number of cases where an employee has tweeted, added to their wall, or commented on a blog inappropriately or worse in a way critical of the brand. It’s easy to write these off as isolated instances, but it happens a lot. That’s why companies institute social media policies for their organizaiton’s employees to follow. It gives them recourse and a limited amount of protection should they fire someone (as also mentioned in the article above).

A better tactic is to use the brand as the leader, not an individual. The account(s) are owned by the company, not the individual. The passwords are the property of the company. If the individual leaves, the account remains in tact but with a new author. Does the author get some credit? Sure, in the profile section of the company brand’s account. For example, the account for your product could be titled “AcmeWidgets” with a profile that states “AcmeWidgets provides product information and company communications. Our account is written and managed by JoAnn Smith, an Acme employee with six years of experience in the Widget Industry.” (See our Twitter account profile as an example: @ImpactInteract.)

That way, the focus of your company’s social media efforts remains on the brand not on the personality of the employee. It also gives credit to your employee, but allows your company to switch out the author at any time without losing your audience. 

While some ‘gurus’ and social media ‘experts’ will argue about transparency or being authentic here, this tactic is transparent/authentic, it gives your company a social media voice, and it allows for a measure of protection of your most valuable asset…. your brand.

Sometimes, it pays to follow a contrarian idea and go against the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ especially if it involves maintaining your brand’s position and standing in an ever growing social world.

Back to the blog

Has “Twitter Policing” Gone too Far in the UK?

Impact Interactions recently returned from a weeklong trip to London’s Internet World Conference held from April 27th – 29th. This journey across the pond allowed us to gain a firsthand insight on where the UK market is in terms of using Social Media in B2B settings. We learned that consumers and businesses alike are a bit behind compared to US efforts utilizing Social Media. Amongst consumers, Facebook is a popular site but Twitter is a foreign tool to many people in the UK. Businesses and consumers are struggling to figure out what philosophy and tools they should adopt in regards to Social Media. A recent court ruling has also raised questions over government policies in place to monitor threatening messages online.

For example, read this InformationWeek article titled, “Twitter Bomb Joker Convicted” for further evidence. Paul Chambers, a 26 year old accountant has been fined $1,500 for a Tweet he posted earlier this year which was clearly a joke. According to The Register, Chambers, frustrated with the closure of an airport due to poor weather tweeted, “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your s*** together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!” Chambers was charged with sending a threatening electronic message and The Doncaster Magistrates’ Court left no doubt on where they stand for this type of behavior.

Now I do not claim to be an expert in terrorism policy. However, in my opinion this conviction goes a bit too far and like many businesses in the UK, government officials have a lot to learn. I understand that they must protect travelers at all costs, but convicting people who are obviously joking and present no immediate threat is going off the deep end. Not to mention that Tweeting about an impending airport bombing is not the best route to secrecy (even more reason to believe Mr. Chambers was just kidding). What are your thoughts on this, as well as other Social Media trends in UK and across Europe? Please leave us your feedback below. We would love to hear from you. You can also access our presentation at this year’s Internet World conference titled, “B2B Social Media: What Works 2010” by accessing the Social Media Resources tab above.

Eric Willey, Manager of Client Services

Back to the blog

What Have You Done For Your Community Lately?

If I could sum up the advice I gather from books and seminars about networking and building business relationships, whether it takes place on a social media site like “LinkedIn” or a face-to-face meeting, it would be this: “Ask not what your network can do for you, ask what you can do for your network.”

Now take that sentence and substitute the word “online community” for “network”. It still works. The members of a community are connecting to help each other professionally in some way. And they are certainly helping the sponsor of the community drive a business objective. Part of managing a community, just as in managing a network, is focusing on furthering the interests of the people you’re interacting with, rather on focusing solely on how they can help you.

I was reminded of this philosophy when I read “Seven Steps to Creating a B2B Community on Twitter.”  The article relays best practices for creating a relationship with your followers that is more about giving than taking to help build a thriving community.

What examples do you have of ways  you have created a win-win situation for your community members?

Back to the blog

Social Media Management Tools – Are they Ready for the Enterprise?

by Matthew Lees

Over the past 6-12 months a lot of companies and technology platforms have entered the market purporting to make it easier for individuals and organizations to participate throughout the social Web. If you’ve got accounts at one or more social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and LinkedIn, why, for example, should you have to log into each one? Wouldn’t it be much easier simply to log into one interface to organize, read, post, and search comments?

I’ve seen the phrase Social Media Management used as a catch-all for these types of tools. That sums things up as well as anything else.

To a basic degree, this is the idea behind Twitter-centric apps such as HootSuite, Seesmic, and TweetDeck. If you’re using Twitter on your own, these programs may meet your needs just fine. But the social Web stretches beyond Twitter and, if you’re responsible for social media at a large organization, you’ve got quite a few requirements beyond convenience. When the stakes are high, when there are more than one or two stakeholders involved, and when time – yours and your colleagues’ – is at a premium, many of these systems fall short.

What Makes Social Software Enterprise* Ready?
I see six main categories where enterprise social applications differentiate themselves from software that isn’t ready or appropriate for enterprise environments:

1. Security – We’ll start with what’s probably the most obvious item on the list. Enterprise social software adheres to high standards of security, both in terms of technology (i.e., secure protocols) and process (i.e., the ability to define access and keep audit trails; see below). How comfortable would you be sending your social security number to someone via a Twitter direct message?
2. Access, Accountability, and Auditing – These are the three As of enterprise social software. (Well, I just made that up…but it works well.) Social software for the enterprise lets system administrators set user permissions and access in a granular and effective way; it tracks activity and creates an audit trail, so you can determine who did what, when; and it allows for passwords to be recovered and/or changed as appropriate.
3. Content Management – Twitter is an example of a very rudimentary form of content management, which is pretty much based purely on a “push” model of publishing. Once you tweet, it’s out there…you can’t take it back and you can’t change it. Enterprise social software includes content management capabilities that let you save, undo, modify, and schedule for publishing at a later date. It also lets you adapt content to the particular channels you’re sending it to, and to choose which channels to send what (i.e., “I want this post to go to Twitter and Facebook, and I want that comment to go to our corporate blog).
4. Performance – This primarily encompasses speed, scalability, and reliability. For example, if Flickr or Facebook go down for a while, you’ve got little, if any, recourse. With enterprise social software, you should have support people to talk with and (usually) SLAs in place.
5. Integration Points – Enterprise social software will have hooks that allow for bi-directional integration, so data can come in from appropriate sources, and be sent out to other places (such as other applications, such as a CRM system, sites on the social Web, or your branded customer community). The architecture is important here, as ideally the platform’s engine is robust enough so that when the next new big social network crops up, it would be easy enough to configure its integration.
6. Analytics and Reporting – Social analytics providers are doing strong business helping organizations make sense of the social Web. Most social sites and tools provide woefully limited statistics. Of course, they weren’t designed with reporting in mind – particularly unified reporting, which lets you look at everything from one place — but if you’re using them for your business, you need to understand their effectiveness and impact. And that goes beyond counting how many Twitter followers and Facebook fans you have.

Note that many of these items translate into increased productivity. Social Management Tools, whether enterprise-ready or not, are largely, though not exclusively, about making it easier for individuals and organizations to do social media more efficiently and effectively.

Social Media Management Platforms
A few of the companies doing some interesting and promising things in the Social Media Management space are:
•    Socialize Your Stuff (Butterfly Publisher platform)
•    Regroup
•    Social Agency (Spredfast platform)
•    Spry Hive Industries

Community platform vendors are also thinking about how branded communities fit into all this, as well. On the leading edge of the trend toward connecting your customer communities to the social Web are:
•    Awareness
•    Lithium Technologies
•    LiveWorld
•    RightNow Technologies (Social Experience platform)
•    Pluck

Of course, the tools can only do so much. Technology platforms won’t get you where you want to go without a sound business strategy and a plan for engaging with your customers, members, readers, followers, prospects, etc.  But if you’re evaluating — or reevaluating – your social media strategy and presence, the six items above will play a central role.

———-

* What I Mean by “Enterprise”
“Enterprise” is one of those buzz words that means different things to different people. I’m using it here in a somewhat non-rigorous way to really mean a level of sophistication and maturity. Enterprise software is sturdy and full-featured, to meet the many and varied needs of professional organizations. In this way, it relates to the concept of enterprise architecture, particularly the definition from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research: “Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model.”

Back to the blog

Walking out the Door with the Twitter Password: A Few Words on Social Media Maturity

by Matthew Lees

Mathematical Maturity
My high school calculus teacher often talked about “mathematical maturity.” It became a phrase we dreaded hearing, because, when he used it – usually in the negative (i.e., that someone wasn’t being mathematically mature) – it meant that person had tackled a math problem like an amateur; that they weren’t using all the information or tools at their disposal; that they were doing things the way a child would. Ouch.

But if you demonstrated your mathematical maturity, it meant you didn’t complain if a problem was particularly knotty; that you pulled different techniques out of your mathematical toolkit; and that you took things seriously.

Who’s Got the Twitter Password?
In three unrelated instances over the past few weeks, I heard three different people pose more or less the same question: “If the person at your company who manages your Twitter and Facebook accounts leaves the company, what do you do if they forgot to tell you the passwords?”

If you’re the one tasked with setting things straight, you’re definitely facing a challenge. Who wants to track down and call up a former colleague to recover a password? Sure, most people would be helpful (if, in fact, they actually remember the passwords). But there’s also the possibility for ex-employees to cause mischief.

The real problem, though, arose before the employee left the firm. The organizations in the scenario above never should have let it get to this point.

So why did it happen?

Largely, I think, because we’re still in the early stages of the social media phenomenon, and things are still being done on an ad hoc basis. Many organizations are seemingly OK with people setting up Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other accounts on their own. And they’re not thinking through the ramifications.

Social Media Maturity
To me, social media maturity means having the systems, processes, resources, and organizational mindset to get the most out of what social media has to offer. It means thinking things through and being prepared for different eventualities. More specifically, it means:

1. Knowing your business goals – There’s a lot already written about business goals and determining ROI (including several posts on this blog, including this one), so I won’t delve into it here, other than to say this should be the starting point in any social media or online community initiative.

2. Clearly defining roles and responsibilities – It’s essential to set expectations and know who’s responsible for what (including passwords).

3. Creating sensible and effective processes – Here’s where the organizations above really dropped the ball. IT departments know how to set up new network and email accounts when an employee is hired, and they know what to do when someone leaves. They also know how to manage network access, and how to recover and/or reset passwords as warranted. You should have similar procedures in place for all social sites.

Don’t Forget Consultants and Agencies
Everyone on your team and in your project sphere should walk the social media walk. So if you work with consulting firms, agencies, and others on your social media programs, you’ll want to be confident that they’re not going to walk out the door with any passwords, either. Make sure they bring and display a high degree of social media maturity, too.

Do you know who’s got your organization’s Twitter password?

Back to the blog

Welcome to our Special Guest Blogger Matthew Lees

 

I grew up watching television shows where each week there was a “Special Guest Star” on an episode each week. These guests provided a little extra to the show and usually were cool celebrities. Think of all the villains on Batman for example or the Brat Pack on “Vegas” or the vacationers on Fantasy Island…or for those of you a little younger, the guests on the Simpsons.

Following that idea, I’d like to introduce our Special Guest Blogger, independent analyst Matthew Lees.

Matthew is a well respected analyst in the Social Media and Online Community World (see his bio here). He is the author of reports through the Patricia Seybold Group such as:

1. Selecting An Online Community Platform
2. Best Practices In Crowdsourcing
3. Analyst Report: Lithium’s Social CRM Suite

After reading his research and reviews of his findings, I thought Matthew truly understood how to make social media technology work in an enterprise organization. So, like all good social media practitioners I followed him on Twitter (@mlees) and his blog. Matthew and I first met in person at one of Forum One’s Online Community Unconferences. We’d been reading each other’s blogs and reports and discovered that we come to the industry with the same high level focus… using these tools to improve business results. While Matthew focuses on the technology and its impact, we focus on the process and the users. Together, we cover the issues that all enterprises need to succeed in their social media projects.

We decided in late December over a crab cake lunch here in Maryland, that we should find a way to collaborate together. Our idea is to inform, educate, and drive the best practices we’ve developed to a broader audience with this blog and our twitter accounts. Matthew will be posting here over the next few months both independently and collaboratively with our team members.

If you have a suggested issue of topic for us to cover, please contact us by adding a comment on this entry or by using our contact form.

So, with that said welcome Matthew!

Mike Rowland, President

Back to the blog

Social Media – The Global Story

The world is adopting social media at higher and higher levels according to a recent Neilsen Report.  According to the research by Neilsen, global time spent on social media sites increased by 82% in December 2009 when compared with December 2008. Pretty large increase especially if you look into the footnotes and understand that this research is based upon only U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. No China, no India, no Russia, nor are there any Nordic countries listed.

But this growth coincides with what we’re seeing here at Impact Interactions. We’ve helped develop and launch multiple communities in countries such as China, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Poland, and elsewhere over the past several years. And while clients are still interested in their communities in the U.S. their focus is shifting. We are seeing more interest in companies asking us to help them launch communities and social media plans in countries ranging from Japan to Russia to Brazil to Mexico.

The growth in third party applications such as Twitter and Facebook have helped companies to understand the potential reach of the medium, but it is the local language social networks like StudiVZ (German) which have helped in-country marketing teams decide that they must be engaged with their customers using social tools. So even as Facebook moves past these local social media/networks, the smart marketer understands that it’s not the tool so much as it’s the growth that matters in deciding whether social media is a good tactic in a particular market.

In our experience leading a social media workshop in Innsbruck, Austria at the prestigious Management Center of Innsbruck it was clear that our non-US audience were more engaged on local language social media tools including blogs and social networks than on the U.S. offerings. (In fact, it was there that I learned more about StudiVZ and other offerings.)

That doesn’t mean that non-U.S. members are not on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. But it does mean that for the savvy global marketer the research and identification of which sites or applications to use is a bit more difficult. While the strategy remains the same, each Internet culture requires a clear focus on localized tactics. That means a cookie cutter approach using the same tools like Twitter, Facebook, or other application across multiple markets will not deliver the results you desire.

Watch the growth, it’s here to stay. But also look for the smaller sites that can deliever more value to your organization when using social media globally. As the old adage goes “All marketing is local.” The same applies to social media.

 

-Mike Rowland, President

Back to the blog

Misleading Indicators – Followers & Friends

Saw this on my twitter feed yesterday:

What immediately struck me was the implied assumption that the number of followers you have infers a level of influence. In our opinion that’s a risky assumption to make especially if you are going to make a business decision using this as a key metric.

Here is what I sent back to Jeremiah via DM:

Let me translate my Twitterese….

The number of followers is not a direct measure of influence. Too many ‘experts’ in the social media field believe that it is and continue to sell this notion. I can quickly and easily increase the number of my followers using hashtags and keywords that are popular. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am a stronger influencer than I was with a lower number of followers.

Those folks with a larger number of followers should not necessarily receive special treatment from brands. The number of followers or friends a person has on Twitter or Facebook really has minimal bearing on their actual influence. (I know that’s a bit heretical, but I’ll get to the why in a little bit.)

• How many people have used the various advertised services to build their followers rather than organically growing their followers by posting relevant content and ideas?
• How many people send an invite/friend request/twitter follow to every email address they have expecting the ‘polite’ return linking/friending/following behavior?
• How many of the top people in terms of followers have a large brand behind them, providing follower building support? (Example, if you only tweet about HP or Oreo Cookies you’ll develop following due to the power of the brand not necessarily because you are a thought leader in the space.)

Because these numbers can be manipulated, they are not to be trusted as a direct metrics proxy for influence.

The example that I use in our social media workshops uses a metric that everyone thought was a useful metric way back when in 2000-2003: Hits. The logic at the time was that the more hits there were in a given period of time, the better the site was in meeting its goals. But alas, this metric could be easily manipulated. Want more hits? Add more banner ads, objects, photos, etc. to the page. Voila! Higher counts so more success, right? Well, not really.

Follower counts are the same as hit counts. Look at some of the top people on Twitter with 5,000+ followers. If they are focused on a single topic, they probably do have influence. But most people are not that focused, tweeting about business, sports teams, their family, current events, pets, politics, etc. Do these folks really have a sphere of influence that marketers can embrace and attempt to cultivate through the Twitter Celebrity? Hard to tell.

The idea of identifying influencers in an easy to understand and quick manner has been a search for the holy grail since online communities started becoming more popular in 2000. At Participate.com, we hired smart people to analyze metrics and activities to develop relevant networked connections that indicated a level of influence within the community.  We used the new techniques of social mapping as well as relationship metrics of interactions. The work was never easy and it never gave a true understanding of influence. What did give some insight into influence, was looking to see how others interacted with the individual, not how many individuals read his or her content.

For marketers, a better way to measure influence is to analyze the content being added on Twitter in conjunction with analyzing who the person’s followers are. This is a tough, manual project. But in the end, you’ll have a much better understanding of whether or not a particular individual with a high following is actually an influencer.

As much as we want one, sometimes there is no holy grail. Using simple metrics as proxies is not a substitute for the hard work that data analysis takes to prove a hypothesis. Don’t fall for the trap of taking the easy way out.

Have a different opinion? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments’ section.

Back to the blog

B2B Communities – What Works

We gave a presentation at last week’s Online Community Unconference (site is open to the public as of June 19th per Forum One) in Mountain View, CA on B2B Communities. We weren’t surprised by the number of attendees looking to learn more about the best practices for running a B2B Community, but were surprised a little bit by some of the misperceptions on managing them.

Top Best Practices for B2B Communities:

1. B2B Community Members have higher expectations than B2C members. You must engage with them as they want to engage with your company just as much as they want to engage with their peers.
2. B2B Communities require internal SMEs to engage early and remain committed to meeting member needs until external SMEs can compliment the internal SME efforts.
3. Third party applications like Twitter and Facebook should not be used as external competitive communities, but rather should be utilized as beacons to drive traffic to your community and key information.
4. You can measure the ROI for B2B communities, but you cannot get there by using only community software metrics and/or web analytics packages like Omniture or Google Analytics. None of these provide true value metrics that have an economic value associated with them. To get to ROI, you must build relationships within your organization so you can obtain real data on customers, leads, ecommerce transactions, etc.
5. When budgeting for B2B communities, be realistic. For example, no single vendor of software or web design or implementation services will ever come in exactly where they quote when you want additional features or customization. So build a small cushion into your budget to be safe.
6. To attract business decision makers, you must focus on how they will use the site… not how you want to market to them.
7. The higher the level within an organization your potential members have attained, the lower the amount of time they will have to spend on your site. So don’t waste their time!

In short, B2B communities can deliver impressive results when managed properly with a focus on those segments who deliver the value to your organization. Don’t be all things to all people, that strategy is doomed to fail. To learn more about the best practices for B2B communities, please download our presentation , ask questions in the comments area below, or contact us.

Back to the blog