A question from a reader sparked this new stream. Jeff Hurt from NADP asked me if I has written anything on how to measure the success or failure of working with social media as a tool. Or, put another way, is our organization benefiting from the fact that we have people trying to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare, YouTube, Flickr, etc as methods for distributing information, or communicating with constituents. This is a great question because it forces us to analyze what benefits can we get, are we getting them, and is there a return on investment.
Let’s define what it means to be a success or failure first. From a generic standpoint, if you accomplish a goal using social media and achieve a positive return in the effort, I would call that a success. If you do not achieve what you set out to do, or it costs you more in productivity and resources than the benefit of what you got, it is a failure. One nice thing about social media is the underlying tools are generally free so the only investment is mindshare and the time of the people using the tools. Although, this can be expensive for smaller firms if you think about a person doing this full time. With that general measurement out of the way, let’s talk about some specific ways to measure social media…
I think one of the more interesting ways to measure it would be the volume of connections that your staff can collectively reach out to when they choose. For example, if I own a company with 50 employees, and each employee averages 300 electronic contacts, that means we have 15,000 possible connections. So if we chose to send a viral marketing video out to all of our connections, that is a pretty good start on creating a viral campaign. But what if out of 50 employees, we average 20 connections? That is a reality today in some cases and it points out that a time of tech savvy employees can potentially “network” faster and better than a group that is not good with social media. What if organizations actually trained people in how to build their electronic networks? What if the organization then leveraged these contact in appropriate ways to push out information, gain knowledge, or find leads?
We can certainly measure success or failure by setting up a system of analytics to track how social networking can cause an action to happen. For example, I want to distribute a cool marketing video. I can track the number if times it is viewed, and can guess that some people will rip it locally and send it through email so the viewing number will actually be higher. We can Twitter about something we are doing and provide a link to a Web page and measure how many people go to the page the day before and the day after the tweet was sent out. Even soft measurements can be done. I sent out an email to all my LinkedIn network about the latest company I founded (iThryv) and had at least 5 people email me and offer help. Now my total investment was a few minutes a day over the last 2 years to build my network, then 5 minutes to write a message to my list of connectors. For this investment, I had 5 interesting introduction of key opinion leaders sent to me that can really help move us forward. My soft measurement tells me I got a great ROI from investing my time in LinkedIn.
The final way I think we could measure success or failure in the social networking realm is to monitor our online reputation as an organization. When you do a search on your company name, what comes up? Are people talking about you? Are they saying good things or bad? Are there lots of mentions of you in blogs and on Twitter? We are at the very beginning of a time when sales prospects, future employees, competitors, and current customers are checking our online reputations. More and more information is being archived every second on the Web so what people are saying about us will stick around for a while. One sure way to grade how we are doing with social networking is the amount of chatter about the organization. This will at least show that people are having discussions about you, and with you. The next step is for those discussions to be positive.
How to measure something that can be soft and not have direct analytics can be tough. It is like trying to measure how much you love someone!! There will always be a wide array of interpretations as to what Love is, and the same holds true for social networking. Yet, we do have proof points that can be found in both of these areas. Since Valentines Day is still fresh on your minds, an example would be this… If you are really IN love with your valentine, you planned their gift since just after the first of the year. If you simply love your valentine, you scrambled at the last moment to save your tail. If you really just care for your valentine, they merely got a card. That measurement system clear things up huh…
Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com