Came upon this article as I was reading the CW Bulletin, a publication from the International Association of Business Communicators. With new media campaigns in full force, and everyone touting the value of how many friends or followers they have, I am happy to see someone else notice that it is quality not quantity that measures social media success. I also love the straightforward responses to this.
Measuring Success in Social Media: An interview with Katie Paine
Katie Paine is CEO and founder of Katie Paine and Partners, a marketing and PR measurement consultancy, and the author of the book Measuring Public Relationships. In an interview with Executive Editor Natasha Nicholson for the CW Radio podcast, she talked about how social media have changed marketing and PR, and offered tips on how communicators can measure their social media efforts.
NN: In your article for the November-December 2009 CW, you mention three mental earthquakes, or changes, that are taking place in marketing and PR because of social media. Could you explain more about what those are?
KP: Well, the first one is probably the one that everybody is probably most aware of, which is the redefinition of timeliness. I use the example of when there was a dust-up with the leading blogger Robert Scoble and Facebook. At the time Facebook was our client, and I was following it pretty carefully. A couple of hours after I started following it, Shel Israel, another very prominent blogger, said, “It’s been three hours, where’s Facebook?” And it suddenly occurred to me that three hours is a lifetime in social media. So our whole notion of what it is to be timely has to change.
The other thing is that our whole definition of success has to change because for too long communication was really focused on gaining eyeballs. That it’s somehow communication’s role to reach media or some other interim thing that eventually reached the customer. It was all about if I reach this, I can reach this many potential eyeballs.
We have to redefine our measure of success. Because it used to be that big numbers were better. So a million “eyeballs” in The New York Times or a million “eyeballs” per month on nytimes.com doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is how many people actually do something. So it’s not how many eyeballs but what the people who own those eyeballs are actually doing with the stuff you are sending. Are they clicking? Are they engaging, responding or retweeting? Are they signing up? Are they giving you an e-mail address? Are they actually interacting with your brand? That’s what matters. And it’s going to be very small numbers.
I use the example that in the olden days, Walmart would have counted success by reaching 11 million people or 11 million moms. Now they credit 11 moms who got a whole bunch of people to get engaged with their product. They literally said, “one of the reasons we made our profit numbers in quarter one of this year [2009] was because of those 11 moms.” Eleven. Not 11 million, but just 11. That’s all it took, because those moms became engaged with the brand, passed on the information and literally contributed to sales.
NN: How do you think communicators are reacting to these changes? Do you think they are in tune and able to be nimble?
KP: I actually think that this is going to be one of those big times where you see people being nimble and getting a huge jump on the competition. As with any company or organization in down times or times of a recession, those companies that continue to invest in marketing, continue to invest in communication, tend to leapfrog the competition, if the competition is retrenching and retreating and cutting their communication budget. Really what’s happening now—never mind the recession—is a great opportunity.
Probably about 40 percent of people out there are really embracing social media and getting into it, understanding it and really learning how to take advantage of this whole new crazy social media world. And then there’s the other side of the coin, which is, “I can’t deal with it, it’s too scary; the lawyers won’t let me, it can’t be measured”—excuses, excuses, excuses. And those people doing that aren’t going to be around for very long.
NN: It’s that last question about measurement that keeps coming up probably from that last 60 percent—the question of, “Well, how do you measure it?” If a company is doing well, how can you point to its social media presence as part of that success?
KP: It’s not very complicated. It’s the same kind of measurement we’ve had all along. There are three basic tools you use.
One is content analysis. So you analyze what is being said about you, you analyze the conversation and you find out: Are they positioning you the way you want to be positioned? Are they communicating your key messages? Are they communicating the thoughts of your thought leaders? Are they getting your brand premises, your brand promises, characteristics and attributes? Are those things being talked about?
Or are they talking about the competition? Are they basically bashing you? There are lots of different ways to hurt your brand in social media. And what you want to know is: Are they? So there’s basic content analysis. We’ve been doing it on traditional media for decades now, and yes it’s a little more complicated now because there’s a little bit more variety. It’s not like five different article types or 27 different types of conversations. It’s not as easy to say simply that there’s a reporter and a publication because there’s now actually a blogger, the blog itself and commenters. So now it’s a little more complicated, but basically [it’s] the same principle—you develop a set of parameters you want to track, and you track them, and you have people coding them. That is all one way of saying yes, my share of favorable positioning is 20 percent better than it was at last year this time. That’s success.
The second method that we’ve had all along is surveys. Granted, the surveys are now being done electronically, but if you want to know whether you are improving your relationships with your customers, or improving your reputation, or the awareness of your product, or your brand preference or any of those things, you can still do that. You can basically do a study, institute some social media stuff and do another study and see whether things have changed. That’s the same way we’ve been measuring awareness, preference, reputation and relationships for decades.
The big difference, and this is probably the biggest difference between old measurement and new measurement, is now we have very sophisticated web analytics. Whether you pay for something like Omniture or you use Google Analytics, you have far more sophisticated things. So when Southwest does something on its blog, it goes into its tracking system, which goes into its CRM system, which says yes in fact that blog is responsible for X number of ticket sales. If you don’t have a system like that, you can still look at your Google Analytics and say, “Yes, in fact my traffic is up 20 percent since I did XYZ on Twitter. From my Facebook page, I am getting 37 percent more downloads of my white papers.” Google Analytics, web analytics is not a new thing. It hasn’t been used very broadly in communication, but it is the third leg of the measurement toolkit that you have to measure your results. It’s not really hard at all. I think a lot of this “can’t be measured” stuff is just a bad excuse.
Reprinted from IABC’s CW Bulletin: http://www.iabc.com/cwb/archive/2010/0810/Paine.htm
