Well, that’s what I thought before I joined a PR firm and yes, I admit that I was wrong. My analytics background stems from managing multimillion dollar search campaigns; where one tenth of a percentage point made a difference in the performance of a campaign. Every dollar invested was tracked, measured and easily backed by a strong ROI. Transitioning into social media several years ago has brought an entirely new set of metrics to the table that I am still learning to this day.
In the past, I have always reported into some sort of web marketing organization and due to the nature of my job, I have worked closely with internal PR teams on various projects. To be completely honest, I’ve always had this particular perception that PR metrics were soft. Although I never said anything out loud, I would consistently chuckle under my breath when I saw something like the following on a “what we are measuring” slide:
- Media Coverage
- Sentiment
- Impressions
And now a new chapter emerges in my career and I find myself working for a PR firm, Edelman Digital. From a metrics perspective, I honestly thought that I would bring to the table significant metrics experience due to my “direct marketing” background. Boy was I wrong. I am probably the dumbest person in the room when it comes to measuring social media. I am surrounded by colleagues that not only understand metrics but are pristine in the way they can communicate those metrics to others and correlate them back to business value. I guess the key takeaways for me are – assuming is bad (very bad), stereotyping is bad (very bad) and I work for a pretty kick a$$ team and learn something new every day (yay for me).
But the reality is that social media metrics in general are soft.
What I mean by soft is that most of it is based on assumptions. Now this isn’t a bad thing at all; in fact, brand marketing and advertising is even softer, yet less scrutinized than social media. I have been asked questions like “what’s the value/ROI of corporate blogging?” and my response is something like “well, what’s the value/ROI of billboard advertising?” And to take it one step further, I really don’t see the ROI of organizations that have 50+ people on a web team to support a corporate website that no one really goes to anymore, but that’s just me.
But the issue is that we now have 10, I mean 100 different ways to measure social media that the metrics become diluted and meaningless. I can’t walk into an executive’s office and show him/her X number of slides with a multitude of different ways to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. They want to know how much they are investing and how much they can expect to see in return. Number of comments, RSS subscribers, twitter followers, retweets and a sentiment analysis is meaningless. Until we in the industry (and some smart entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who can create the technology) can confidently attribute a valuable metric to some action or interaction on the social web; the metrics will always be soft.
The best case scenario would be data that can accurately attribute a monetary value to thinks like:
- Tweets/Retweets/Lists/Followers
- Comment/Likes on wall posts/fans
- Comments on blogs/subscribers/RSS
- Everything else..
Until then, we do the best we can and … assume most of it.
So what is a valuable metric?
For most it’s sales. Dell Outlet can confidently attribute a few million dollars to their twitter engagement which I am sure cannibalized a percentage of sales from Dell.com and the products they sell at full price. For others, it could very well be reach, sentiment of just growing a community. However, if this is the case, the metrics should then match the objectives. Executives and marketing managers cannot expect an increase in sales if the business objective is to grow the community. A more effective strategy would be to build a community, earn their trust and delicately ask for their permission to market your services; a wise proverb from Seth Godin.
Bottom line is this.
Social media is important. It gives brands a chance to be human and do the things that humans do; listen, converse, love, give and at times ignore. Measuring these behaviors is difficult yet we all know that it makes a tremendous difference when brands actively engage in the social web.
Metrics are behind; we all know that and I am sure they will catch up. Until then, we have to do our best to identify the right KPIs for each engagement and limit those metrics to 4 or 5 data points.
If a brand engages on the web for the sole purpose of selling products, they are in the wrong place.
So now that this post is going all over the place, I will stop.
