Social media Child’s play or impossible?
measurement

I just don’t get Must show a
the ROI on nice clean
this spreadsheet
Clients....and agencies

“the problem online is never Delicious brings up close to
measurability. It's that you can 3000 results for
measure too many things.\" “socialmedia +
Randall Rothenberg (IAB) measurement”
The problem is we have measurability coming out of
our ears

Is it a case of measuring is easy, measuring the
right things is difficult?

In theory, it is not actually that difficult, metrics really should look at a
combination of three things (Trust, engagement, reach)

Some useful metrics and their pros and cons

Reach - Feed
Compare
• Feed Compare
(feedcompare.com)
• Let’s you look at the
subscribers. More valuable
than raw numbers as shows
who comes back
• However, reliant on Feed
burner feeds

Reach - Statbrain However, it’s only a guess and from our
experience it seems to overestimate visitor
Takes Alexa, Google etc rankings and numbers
works out how many visits a site gets

Trust - Twingly
• Swedish based search engine
• Rather than throw everyone
into a big international pot, it
gives blogs trust scores
measured against other similar
language blogs
• So Swedish blogs are ranked
against other Swedish blogs,
Danish blogs scored vs other
Danish blogs etc

Trust and reach -
Twinfluence
• A great open tool that starts
from the premise that not all
numbers are equal
• You might only be followed by
100 people, but they might be
100 v influential people
• Gives you 2nd order followers
and ‘social capital’ scores
• Obviously the person has to be
on Twitter

PostRank
• Measures engagement - do
people actually bother to
comment on, bookmark, pass
on what you write about
• AdAge recently changed its
Power 150, with PostRank
being the top metric
• Good English speaking
coverage, sometimes non
English speaking sites are
patchy

But we’re not big fans of...

Arguably the most
A judgement call
important criteria

Checking for
ourselves
• It gets into muddy ROI waters
but you miss a lot if you just fall
back on the metrics
• Sometimes someone may fall
through the measurement
criteria but you know it makes
sense if they are included
• Ideally making judgement calls
should enhance your expertise
- a sign that you practice what
you preach and don’t always
rely purely on the spreadsheet

“If you treat people's conversations as media --
social media -- your ROI is zero (or even
negative) because you'd be doing it wrong. But
for social marketing done right, the potential
ROI could be infinite -- when you divide a
number by a cost of zero (ad dollars spent),
you'd get infinity.”
Augustine Chou, Click Z
Final thought on the matter

Find me at
• Twitter - dirkthecow
• www.thisisherd.com
• www.thisiscow.com
• delicious.com/dirkthecow

Flickr creative commons credits
• Y0Si • Nikita Kashner
• Finishing School • Ger Through
• Al Bar • Midnight Digital
• Podchef • Come Closer
• bitterlysweet • Cambodia4kids
• Yeweyni
• Cosmic Spanner
• Kevin Luffs
• eCRAFTic