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 [...]
This is late news, sorry. But I, along with Tac Anderson and LaSandra Brill participated in a podcast last month facilitated by 1to1 Media (a division of Peppers & Rogers Group). Here is quick excerpt of the podcast (listen to part 1 and part 2), but you will have to listen to the entire thing if you want all the juicy details (it’s almost an hour in length):
What do you find are the biggest challenges when it comes to implementing social media?
Tac Anderson: I think a lot of times there is a lot of excitement and people want to make sure they’re not left behind. But because social media touches so many different business groups within a company, everyone wants to add their piece to it. So the biggest challenge I’ve seen is making sure that the goals are properly aligned with what the medium is for.
Lasandra Brill: Here at Cisco, [...]
I came across this excellent resource (thanks Beth) this morning on several methodologies to measure social media.
Rachel Happe, who blogs over at the Social Organization put together this quite awesome list of metrics used to measure social media in the enterprise. This list goes beyond the common metrics used to measure the effectiveness (or not) of marketing activities. One metric that is not on the list – and I think we all struggle with this – is the ability to measure conversations. I mean, really, how do you attach a metric to a two-way dialogue? There are some really cool tools available that monitor conversations and brand mentions online though. Some even use algorithms that rate these conversations based on where they are taking place. Expensive but might be worth the investment.
Tags: measuring social media, social media metrics