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.

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, we’re starting to adopt the Forrester POST strategy (People, Objectives, Strategy, and Tools) for doing that, and making sure that we’re looking at what we’re trying to achieve first before we jump into just what are the tools we want to implement.

Michael Brito: Our biggest challenge is understanding if the people we’re looking to talk to even participate in social media. If they’re not reading blogs, it’s probably not a wise decision to launch a blog. We’ve also adopted the Forrester POST method. They’ve mapped our customer segments -– the people who talk Intel and buy Intel — to various behaviors. That allows us to make sure that we have concrete data and research as we go to market with different projects.

We understand who our customers are, and how they behave online. Then we have to figure out internally what our objectives and strategies are, and then we decide what the tool is. The tool might be a corporate blog, it might be Facebook engagement, or Twitter, or other tools that are available.

Tac Anderson: Sometimes the hardest thing for me to do personally, because I’m such an evangelist for the tools, is to tell people that social media isn’t the right thing to do in an instance. We’re all very eager to prove out what it is that we do, but sometimes it’s not the right tool. You want to make sure that’s clear, because you don’t want to set yourself up for failure.

If you have a chance to listen, please do let me know your thoughts/feedback.

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