1. SELECTED FINDINGS
How to Measure
your Social Media
Impact and ROI
An invaluable guide to finding and
optimising your elusive social media ROI
PLUS sophisticated analysis of cross-industry
measurement strategies, must-have scorecard
metrics and mistakes to avoid
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An invaluable guide to finding and optimising your elusive social media ROI
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It’s the biggest challenge the Who should buy
this report?
social media practitioner faces • hief Marketing
C
Officers (CMOs)
Working out the ROI specifically, and your impact more • ocial Media
S
broadly, are two of the most critical challenges a social media managers and
directors
practitioner faces.
• orporate
C
Unlocking the answers to these two long-recurring bugbears communications
could potentially pave the way to lucrative opportunities for professionals
your brands. • ustomer Service
C
professionals
Fear not. Useful Social Media’s ground-breaking report • arketing
M
offers a fresh guide to effectively implementing social departments
media measurement strategy – and measuring the ROI within SMEs
of campaigns.
Purchase the report today to get...
Practical steps and The key metrics Exclusive Useful A tailored Detail on the
best practice on you need to Social Media and exclusive key differences
assessing impact consider when survey data Scorecard you can between B2B
and calculating measuring your revealing the use to accurately and B2C social media
ROI – from some social media thoughts of hundreds assess your own marketing response
of the leading impact – and of stakeholders on impact – based on and impact
corporate practitioners benchmark figures their approach to ROI best practice from
at work today from industry leaders and measurement... the leaders
Who wrote the report? Our methodology
Veteran writer and journalist Peter Kirwan has more than 20 We interviewed 11 brands including Siemens, Adobe, World
years’ experience reporting on consumer, technology and the Wrestling Entertainment and Hewlett Packard, delving into
financial and business markets. After witnessing the web’s cross-industry similarities and differences in social media ROI
early-stage effects on tech publishing during the late 1990s, and measurement strategies. An additional six interviews were
he launched Fullrun, a subscription-based web site dedicated to completed with social media authors and agency contacts.
analysing the impact of technology on media and marketing in
This was coupled with an industry-wide survey sent to the US,
the tech sector. He is also a regular contributor to The Guardian
Europe and Asia, aimed at a greater number of brands, and looking
and is a social media enthusiast.
at approaches to measurement and ROI, attitudes towards these
strategies and what are their prevailing scorecard metrics.
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An invaluable guide to finding and optimising your elusive social media ROI
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Some key statistics, findings and
quotes we reveal in the Report:
Exclusive USM data revealed 76% say they are ‘quite relaxed’ or
‘somewhat relaxed’ about ROI measurement...
Over 50% of respondents said they are ‘mildly’ or ‘very dissatisfied’ with
the way in which their organisation undertakes measurement, according
to Useful Social Media’s industry-wide survey...
Writer Peter Kirwan states in his conclusions: ‘Metrics are fundamental
to success in the social space. The old saying that we overestimate the
level of change in the short term but underestimate it in the long term
never seemed more apt.’
Jennifer Vogel, Communications Manager at The Rainforest Alliance,
describes the company’s first steps in social media, saying: ‘The evolution
was one of fear. What happens when it's no longer a one-way dialogue?
Everyone has that fear. But gradually it's just become normal.’
Beth LaPierre, chief listener at Kodak, describes using social media as
a market research tool: ‘We can understand how customers use the
product in their life. There's always going to be a value and time for that
in the research process. When we've got some early product ready to go,
we give them to heavy users and get some feedback.’
Stefan Heeke’s top USP of social media is: transparency. ‘Social media
forces us to become more transparent,’ he revealed ‘which is hugely
important for a large corporation because people have suspicions and
fears. Transparency is a huge lever of gaining trust. That's important.’
Social media specialists working in Adobe's business units ‘need to look
at the dirty laundry’, says Adobe’s social media director Maria Poveromo,
in order to ‘figure out what to do to increase performance or change
impact.’
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An invaluable guide to finding and optimising your elusive social media ROI
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Defining Your Impact
Engagement
Engagement is a broad term, wide enough in its meaning to cover a multitude of sins (and
virtues). One recent effort to list social engagement metrics unearthed 35 data types, ranging
from the obvious (downloads and views) to the not-so-obvious (‘print page’, ‘report spam/
abuse’ and visits to a settings page). (Lake, 2009)
Yet we know instinctively what engagement means. And it’s also very clear what Stefan
Heeke, director of online marketing at Siemens, means when he suggests that ‘advertising
and the whole marketing machine is not very good at engaging people’.
Most advertising is based upon interruption. If engagement isn’t quite the opposite of
interruption, it does suggest a willingness on the part of marketers to go with the flow of an
existing conversation, to contribute something back to the network.
At Kodak, engagement is one of four broad metrics measured by chief listener Beth
LaPierre (the others are ‘reach’, ‘impact’ and ‘influence’). If reach involves the total number
of eyeballs exposed to a message, engagement focuses on actions that don’t directly result
in the achievement of a business objective. LaPierre measures engagement across both
kodak.com and the wider web in multiple ways: click-throughs, views, comments, likes
and shares.
The potential metrics here are broad: in fact, LaPierre defines engagement as ‘any action
that’s different from impact’ (which tends to be an outcome which aligns closely with hard-
edged business objectives).
Of the difference between impact and engagement, LaPierre says: ‘It can be fuzzy.’ To
illuminate the difference, she refers to Kodak’s recent Father’s Day campaign. This
campaign encouraged Facebook users to upload their favourite photographs of their father.
The company promised it would publish the ten best photos on its home page and on the
Kodak billboard in New York’s Times Square on Father’s Day. Also associated with the
campaign was a 20% discount on an electronic photo frame with Facebook connectivity at
the Kodak store.
Here’s how LaPierre breaks down this particular campaign’s objectives: ‘One goal is ‘reach’;
another goal would be ‘engagement’, in that we want a lot of people to share and talk about
it. But the real impact is in how many click-throughs did we get to the product page?’
As you might expect, Avinash Kaushik, the guru of web analytics, detects some challenges
with measuring engagement. Specifically, Kaushik has this to say on the subject:
(Kaushik, 2010)
‘Metrics masquerading as engagement in the analytics-o-sphere are not really metrics, they
are an excuse to (a) not accept the limits of the possible and (b) hide what is actually being
measured.’
Furthermore, Kaushik suspects that traditional web analytics can only measure a part of
what we think of as engagement. In other words, it can measure the degree of a user’s
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An invaluable guide to finding and optimising your elusive social media ROI
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must-have scorecard metrics and mistakes to avoid
engagement, but not the kind of that engagement. Here’s how Kaushik breaks down
engagement into ‘degree’ and ‘kind’:
Degree: the degree of positive or negative engagement lies on a continuum that ranges
from low involvement to high. An engaged person is someone with an above-average
involvement with his or her object of relatedness.
Kind: customers can be positively or negatively engaged with a company or product. A
more in-depth examination of [engagement by] kind would reveal its content, usually a
mixture of emotional states and rational beliefs, such as in the case of positive engagement,
sympathy, trust, pride and so on.
If these definitions seem overlapping at first, the difference becomes clearer once we start to think
of degree as being largely quantifiable and kind as being about largely qualitative judgments.
On the web, engagement by degree can be measured by metrics like frequency of visits,
depth of visit, outcomes (a download or full/partial video view). According to Kaushik,
measuring engagement by degree involves more complex approaches, including surveys,
likelihood to recommend (‘a strong proxy for engagement’) and customer retention over
time (‘months of data, segmented for online and offline and for various micro-segments of
your online population’.)
Engagement: Some practical lessons
We asked our interviewees how they measured users’ engagement with their social media
presence. The answers fell into two categories: those who measured degree of engagement
in fairly straightforward fashion; and those who also measured kind of engagement, largely
by using offline survey techniques.
-- Stefan Heeke of Siemens: reach and social impressions:
‘We will look at the hashtag usage, how much buzz we’ve created, how many followers, the
tonality of it… But I think the only thing you can really measure is reach. We sort of look at
social impressions, how many people are posting things, or on Facebook, people putting
something in the status. We apply a factor to that.
‘So, for instance, let’s say someone uses an app and then they say, ‘I just used an application’
and they post that on their status or say, ‘I like this’ or ‘I follow this’. This is something
that’s public to the friends of the person putting up that status update. So these are social
impressions. If 10,000 did that, put it on their status, you can multiply it by 100 -- everybody
has 100 friends. So you actually have a reach of 1m by people sharing information.
‘We measure that on a project-by-project basis. So, take the water footprint app, we can
see how many people put that on their status.
‘If you just look at the followers, people might say 5,000 followers is small. But if you can
say that 10,000 posted content that will travel through the social network… It’s not a hard
number, obviously, but it’s argument.’
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Influence
If, as Andrew Bruce Smith suggests, there tend to be two approaches to measuring the
output of social media investment -- one derived from web analytics, the other from branding
and PR -- the measurement of influence certainly traces its lineage to the PR industry.
In the pre-web era, influencers were easy to spot: they were typically ‘experts’ (academics,
financial analysts, business leaders, columnists). It was partly the job of publicists to
influence these ‘experts’, whose opinions would subsequently be amplified by mass media
and trickle down toward the broader public.
Katie Delahaye Paine, the measurement guru, argues that social media has ‘officially signed
the death certificate’ for this model of influence. (Delahaye Paine, 2011)
Elite influencers
No doubt. But the idea of influence isn’t dead. On the contrary, it has persisted online. As
early as 2000, the PR agency Burson Marsteller released the first in a long line of reports on
America’s ‘e-fluentials’, which suggested that the opinions of the most vocal and influential
consumers were greatly amplified by the web. (Holmes, 2001)
‘Representing 8% of the internet population (about 9 million users), this group influences
more people on more topics than other online users. And, they are eight times more effective
at communicating their views than Roper’s traditional ‘influentials’.’
From the mid-noughties onward, spurred on by Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point,
the ability to identify and sell stories to an influential elite of bloggers became a selling point
for many PR agencies. (Gladwell, 2001)
In 2006, Technorati, the blog search engine, struck up a partnership with Edelman, the PR
agency. On the basis of this exclusive arrangement, Edelman promised to guide its clients
through ‘a chaotic world of continuous discussion, learning from the crowd and remixed
media where companies must cede control to gain credibility’. (Edelman, 2006)
Much of Technorati’s data focused on the growth of blogging as a phenomenon.
Accompanying efforts to identify ‘top 10’ or ‘top 100’ lists of bloggers were intended to
showcase the idea that PR agencies were in a good position to master the dynamics of
conversational marketing. Subsequent efforts at measurement attempted to blend this
focus on elite bloggers with some acknowledgement of the rapid rise of Facebook and
Twitter (frequently referred to at the time as a form of ‘microblogging’). (Brain, 2007)
Efforts such as these, which attempt to measure elite influentials, have been repeatedly
criticised over the years. Yet this is a meme that persists: Technorati is no longer measuring
blog-based influence, but its descendants like PeerIndex have adopted a more sophisticated
approach to the same challenge, measuring elite influencers across multiple social channels.
(Reichenstein)
Watts vs Gladwell: Elite influencers vs random effects
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By the time Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point, the notion of influencers as a driving
force behind the adoption of memes had been around for 50 years or so. In his book, Gladwell
dusted down the ‘six degrees of separation’ experiment conducted by the sociologist Stanley
Milgram in 1967 and contextualised them for a new audience. (Gladwell, 2001)
In that experiment, Milgram gave letters to 160 people in Nebraska, and told them to try to
send the letters on their way to a stockbroker in Boston with whom they had no personal
connection, by sending them to a colleague socially closer to the target. Famously, most of
the letters arrived at their destination after passing through the hands of six intermediaries.
What Gladwell noticed was the way in which half of Milgram’s letters were delivered to the
stockbroker by the same three friends. These individuals were described by Gladwell as
‘connectors’. The rest of us, he argued, are ‘linked to the world through these special few’.
Gladwell’s book itself exerted a powerful influence on the way in which marketers started to think
about influence at the dawn of the social web. Yet it has also been criticised repeatedly by researchers
like Duncan Watts, director of the Human Social Dynamics Group at Yahoo! Research.
Watts has argued that Gladwell attributes far too much power to connectors or influencers.
Instead, Watts’s experiments emphasise the apparently random way in which memes
spread through networks. ‘If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start
one -- and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,’ Watts has said.
As the journalist Clive Thompson noted in 2008, the irony of Watts’s findings is that ‘since you
can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a
market as possible -- and not waste money chasing ‘important’ people’. (Thompson, 2008)
For marketers, this raises multiple questions. One of the most important, in the social realm,
is this: should marketers place their faith in what Sinan Aral, an assistant professor at the New
York University Stern School of Business, calls ‘active personalised messaging’ or ‘passive
broadcast messaging’. The former, says Aral, ‘requires more effort and time, which may curtail
their use’. The latter ‘may reach more people but may be less persuasive’. (Aral, 2010)
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An invaluable guide to finding and optimising your elusive social media ROI
PLUS sophisticated analysis of cross-industry measurement strategies,
must-have scorecard metrics and mistakes to avoid
The Full Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – Social Media: An Introduction
What the report
1.1 ow many companies use it?
H
covers, in detail:
1.2 What do they use it for?
• References
1.3 ocial measurement: our survey results
S
• Contents
• Table of figures
Chapter 2 – Defining Your Impact:
• Executive summary
2.1 ngagement
E
• Introduction
2.2 nfluence
I
2.3 dvocacy
A
2.4 entiment
S
2.5 quivalence
E
2.6 ase study from a leading practitioner
C
Chapter 3 – Measuring Your Impact (Social Media Metrics)
3.1 How do leading companies measure against the metrics
they have set themselves?
3.2 efining the value of a Twitter follower/Facebook fan
D
3.3 aid vs free
P
3.4 ase studies from leading practitioners
C
Chapter 4 – Industry Comparables
4.1 nvestment and returns: What are companies spending and getting?
I
4.2 taff and budget
S
4.3 ifference between b2b/b2c
D
4.4 ase studies from leading practitioners
C
Chapter 5 – The Useful Social Media Scorecard
5.1 he Useful Social Media Scorecard
T
5.2 uestions to ask to assess your own social media impact/ROI
Q
Chapter 6 – Conclusions
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An invaluable guide to finding and optimising your elusive social media ROI
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Key Information:
The Report in numbers
Pages: Charts: Release Date:
168 30+ July 25,
2011
To pick up your copy of this critical business
intelligence report, go to
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