Social Media Metrics

DEFINING & MEASURING SOCIAL MEDIA SUCCESS Jeff Wisniewski [email_address]

Game Plan

Why be social?

Developing a social media plan

Assessing social media success

Why Be Social

‘ 'cause everyone else is doing it and talking about it at conferences and stuff…

‘ cause kids think it’s cool

‘ cause my boss told me to

‘ cause my boss told me NOT to

Why Be Social?

Social media provides innovative ways for libraries to connect with users we may never see face to face

To encourage, promote, innovate, learn, adapt

To improve customer service

To discover and deliver what users want

To “market” without marketing

Why Be Social?

Your Google page rank is influenced by it

People are anxious to interact with you online

85% of Americans using social media think companies should have an active presence in the social media environment. What's even more interesting is that those users actually want the companies to interact with them while there. http://www.coneinc.com/content1182

Over a third of respondents also said they used Facebook to discuss academic work with other students on a weekly basis, and more than half responded positively to the idea of using Facebook for more formal teaching and learning – although only 7 per cent had actually done so.- “Facebook is 'social glue' for university freshers” http://www.physorg.com/news143200776.html

Developing a social media plan

Listen

Prepare

Engage

Measure

1 2 3 4

Listen

Before you engage, listen

What’s the nature of conversation about your library? Is there one?

1

Prepare

Define a strategy

Define goal(s)

Increase awareness of library services, increase number of new cards issued, expose collection “gems”

Pick a platform, or two

The right platform depends on your goals

http://www.slideshare.net/lordorica/social-media-at-sun-microsystems

2

Engage

This is the fun part!

Start blogging/ leaving comments on blogs/responding

upload images to Flickr

building a community on Twitter or FriendFeed

.

3

Measure 4

Gosh, this is hard!

Prospero's Social Media Survey asked large corporations about their social media return on investment (ROI), and while 35% reported positive ROI 41% said that ROI was “unknown”.

P.S.” Traditional” online metrics ain’t no cake walk either

Why measure?

“ if we can't express our objectives and methodology quantitatively, we have zero chance of selling our ideas”

- Dave Evans, ClickZ network

What you’re not measuring…

Friendship

Happiness

Karma

Enlightenment

Girl power!

Measurement

Need a combination of both:

Quantitative

Qualitative

What you are measuring…

The “Trinity Approach”*

Behavior

Outcome

Experience

*developed by Vinash Kaushik

(http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/08/trinity-a-mindset-strategic-approach.html)

Behavior

The “what”

Quantitative

Number of blog posts

Boyd’s Conversation Index

Posts/comments + trackbacks

Should be greater than 1

Number of facebook friends/fans

Views/visits

Outcome

The “tangible benefit” of you social media activity

Higher satisfaction

Fewer help desk calls

More searches

Increase in funding

Experience

Put on your listening ears!

Listen Engage Converse Take action

The experience metric

Experience can be measured and evaluated:

Stars, scars, or neutral?

You LIKE me, you REALLY like me!

Five things to get started

Monitor general search engine results

Monitor social media search engine results

Create alerts

Analytics: Google and Clicky

Assess the nature and sentiment of activity

1 2 3 4 5

Monitor search engine results

Use Google: best job of the big three search engines in indexing and integrating social media sources like blog posts, videos, and Flickr photo sets

1

Monitor social media search engine results

Why?

Used by high value, highly connected, highly influential users

Pays great dividends if they are fans of the library

Choose the specific social media search engines that match your media efforts

2

technorati For blogs and feeds Authority score: the number of distinct blogs linking to you in the past six months, favorites (i.e. your fans) and your blog's rank (Quantitative) Qualitative: Which blogs are linking to you? Are they blogs that your target audience reads and respects? Are readers able to see the blogger as someone "who is like me"? technorati.com

delicious Is your content bookmark-worthy? Use delicious built-in statistics to monitor links to your content, tags and notes. Go to delicious, search for your library, project, or service, and see how many people have bookmarked it (quantitative), when, and see what if any comments have been posted (qualitative). delicious.com

Do you show up? How often?

A search for Seattle library, for example, returns 31 tweets, many among them are "stars".

Advanced search features a local search option: find book sale near "place name" or DVD near "place name".

Create alerts

Check standard web logs for refers from search engines. What terms do people use?

Use quotes

“ University of Pittsburgh” library

Pitt library

Choose “comprehensive” to get results from news, blogs, web, video and groups

Can be notified “as it happens”

3

Google Analytics and Clicky for Social Media

Google Analytics (google.com/analytics) and Clicky Web Analytics (getclicky.com) can be utilized to aid in your social media monitoring.

Create conversion funnel to measure a social media action chain

Look at referrers. Are users coming to your site from social media sites where you have some sort of presence? Does this change over time?

Clicky offers a dashboard called "Traffic Sources" that includes a social media number. Clicky looks for referrers from twenty or so social media sites and aggregates the numbers.

4

Assess the nature and sentiment of activity