Social Media Measurement – Some Thoughts from the C&M Online PR Stable
Everybody’s talking about Social Media and how to harness its potential for business – indeed you can hardly have failed to notice the almost daily Twitter/Facebook/NextBigSocialMediaThing stories appearing all over the news. From Daily Mail health warnings to academic controversy, there’s an awful lot of spin surrounding the subject, making it a real can of worms for companies looking to play the Social Media Game (and who isn’t?).
People want it, but they want to get it right, and it scares them. Here at C&M we are firm advocates of the common sense/jargon-free approach to Social Media and are on a mission to take all of the wizardry and witchcraft out of Online PR campaigns.
Clients are clambering for a piece of the Social Media pie and asking our advice on getting the most out of tools such as Twitter without abusing them. But whenever these conversations come up, the big question on everyone’s lips seems to be ‘how do we measure this stuff?’ It’s another major factor that complicates the whole Social Media process and is an extra worry for clients.
When you are used to dealing with press cuttings, circulation/listening figures and advertising value equivalents in traditional media PR campaign statistics, the relatively unfamiliar territory of Social Media can seem intimidatingly difficult to quantify.
The issue of measurement is a hot topic in the New Media and PR communities at the moment, with open movements such as the Social Media Measurement Camp springing up to discuss ways of capturing the effectiveness of Online PR campaigns.
At the last one of these gatherings, we heard from Beth Granter at The Good Agency and Robin Wilson at McCann Erickson who shared recent experiences of Online PR campaigns and how they went about measuring and reporting their results.
One of the key things that came up was how important it is to establish the parameters by which the campaign will be measured before you even get going. To turn the question back on the client and ask what they are hoping to achieve from engaging with Social Media in the first place makes it much easier to present meaningful reports once the campaign is in full swing.
This process is more straightforward if a campaign has specific goals in mind – e.g. event/membership sign-ups, purchases, conversions etc. But when you are in the realms of a more general branding/awareness effort, it becomes trickier to quantify. In these early days of Online PR, we have very few high profile campaigns against which to benchmark ourselves, making the various stats and reports seem somewhat lacking in context.
So How Do We Measure Social Media?
As well as the obvious measures such as number of followers/posts/comments – which can be manually counted – a whole range of tools are available for calculating the effectiveness of every kind of Social Media activity. For example, Twitter Grader, Twinfluence and TweetStats will give you a handle on the weight and reach of your Twitter campaign, whereas Flickr has its own built in stats package (pro accounts only) to rate picture views etc.
Companies such as Brandwatch and Radian6 offer a more formalised approach to the process with their all-encompassing measurement packages, but it is possible to capture most of the information yourself, albeit in a more piecemeal fashion.
At C&M, we find that taking a campaign ‘snapshot’ at regular intervals is the most practical and useful way of tracking campaign success; whether this be daily, weekly or monthly depends on the overall duration.
Presenting this information to clients is another important factor to get right – you want to give as much relevant intelligence as possible without it becoming unwieldy and overwhelming. Our preferred format includes a ‘quantitative’ segment for the above statistics, plus a more traditional PR-inspired ‘clippings’ section to give a feel for what is being said. This gives clients something more familiar with which to identify, whilst also showing a more balanced picture between the volume and quality of coverage.
Of course measurement isn’t just about making clients happy, it’s about learning what works and what doesn’t so we can improve our campaign tactics in future. And in these early days of Social Media and Online PR, it’s all about the learning and evolving. So as things continue to change and develop, we’ll keep on sharing our thoughts on the subject, but by all means do tell us yours as well – we’re all ears…
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Peregrine
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