How do we even start to talk about measuring social media?
February 19, 2008 by Sebastian Mysko
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I’ve just been to a Chinwag event in Soho, London where a panel of industry professionals battled out the debate of measuring social media.
I find this whole topic incredibly interesting, especially when the panelists on the stage all work within the marketing mix, but have such different professional backgrounds. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still loving all the new tools that are constantly appearing - Dopplr being by current favourite, but measuring conversations? Can it really be done? I think panelist Will McInnes described putting the words conversation and measure together as “wrong and slightly filthy”.
I reckon there’s a couple of thousand CEO’s out there that would love for a measurement formula to be created – even if it’s as ‘fluffy’ as the old school AVE. At least they would have something tangible to work with.
There was a lot discussed tonight, and I believe the full session will be available as a downloadable podcast, but I just wanted to pick up on a few things that got me thinking;
1) One of the panelists believes that focus groups are dead and buried……finite measurement can apparently be achieved by monitoring online conversations…
2) Another said that it is and has been possible for quite some time to monitor everything about a person through analysing their online profile…
3) Product development, word of mouth and transparency are all key to a brand’s success…
4) If you’re going to try and cheat the system – DON’T! Because “people know people” and you’ll eventually always get caught!
I agree with two out of the four above points – and I don’t think it’ll take a genius to work out which two I’m talking about.
Measuring social media is easy if you are clear about your goals. We started measuring consumer generated media back in 1995 and now we evaluate the effectiveness of blogs, blog outreach, YouTube, Facebook and social bookmarking site. Sometimes we show the impact on membership, sometimes we measure against online contributions, and somemtimes we examine the impact on reputation. Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. The difference between social media and traditional media is that social media can be more easily tied to web traffic and using web analytics and traditional statistical analysis tools you can more directly make the connection
Sebastian, thanks for writing up some key points.
I think the most important thing that can come from all of this is some residual value, some concrete things that are useful to those of us fascinated by measuring social media.
What I’m discussing with a few of the people I went ‘up against’ is now creating an informal and open source group to work towards creating that set of industry-agreed measurements and principles.
If this is something you or anyone reading is interested in contributing to, please drop me a mail - it’s Will — my company name — .co.uk
Measuring social media is easy, evaluating it is difficult…
A couple of posts, one by me and one by Seb Mysko, and some comments on the Wolfstar blog about the Chingwag live event on measuring social media - or not!…
[...] Further reviews of the night from Stuart Bruce and Seb Mysko [...]
Thanks for the write-up and hope you found the event useful. Given the panel’s variety of backgrounds, I thought it was interesting to see how widely their approaches varied.
Seems like the numbers of channels and methods for creating conversations using social media has mushroomed to a point that the traditional metrics do need to be re-visited in order to put together measurement tools that are more than a very fluffy re-interpretation of advertising effectiveness.
The podcasts should be up in the next couple of days on our site, they’ll be added to the RSS feed and iTunes. There’s links to both of those feeds here:
http://live.chinwag.com/#podcasts