Measurably Unmeasurable
Food for thought…on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate your ability to measure the impact of your social media strategy?
Stop tweeting, really think about it and be honest.
If you are anything like the interactive marketers graded by Emily Riley of Forrester Research, it is very possible that you are aware of much room for improvement.
“The average grade they gave themselves was 4.5 out of 10,” reports Nate Elliott at the Forrester blog. “Not a great score—especially given that accountability is one of the key selling points of interactive marketing.”
So if it is so measurable, a cornerstone of the marketing world’s Holy Grail, what’s wrong here? With so many platform-specific metrics to call upon, why, on average, are online marketers flunking? Why aren’t we finding ourselves in a pool of accountability bliss? To understand how to fare better in the future, it is important to first understand why we have been struggling in the past.
One possibility is the short-sided reliance on very available, and potentially irrelevant information (i.e. counting followers or fans.) Staring at your fan count can help to pass the time, but does it really tell you anything about what you are trying to achieve? Do you know what you are trying to achieve? Perhaps your goal with joining Facebook was to increase brand exposure. Fair enough. Therefore perhaps you feel that a rising fan count means you are succeeding in your charge.
But let’s take it to the next level. Who are your new fans? What brought them here? Did they attend an event? Receive an eBlast or a friend referral? What are they doing here? Are they getting involved? Are they ranting or raving about you? Or complaining? Are they also following you on Twitter? Are they tweeting about you? Have they ever bought anything from you? Are they likely to? Have any of them already unfriended you? If so, why?
For smaller companies with say, 75 fans, keeping an eye on this activity is fairly simple. However, monitoring Zappos’ Facebook page of 8,700 fans, or the Jonas Brothers’ of just shy of 2 million is a more gargantuan feat. Let’s assume that the Jonas Brothers’ fan count has seen relatively steady growth since its page’s launch. Now let’s say that a few days, or weeks go by and there is no change to the fan count. What does this mean? Did new fans come, and existing fans leave? Or were no new fans added? Why or why not? Was there something in the news that may have caused this change? Bad press, bad haircut? The external Facebook landscape perhaps should be explored as well… should you be concerned with growing dissention groups, “I HATE the Jonas Brothers” group with 72,000 fans, or “1,000,000 Strong Against the Jonas Brothers” with almost 400,000?
The point is- the fan count may tell you from a bird’s eye view whether or not you are popular, but it does not tell you how you are connecting with your fans, who they are or how they really feel about you.
Another suggestion as to why interactive marketers are flunking themselves is the result of information overload. As Elliot puts it,
“Social media marketers are drowning in a sea of metrics. Every social platform and vendor offers its own metrics, and there are literally hundreds of ways to measure the success of social initiatives. With so many numbers to choose from, and so little insight into which metrics are important, it’s not surprising that marketers feel overwhelmed.”
To marketers, too many metrics may seem like too much money to the greedy, or candy to a child- but in reality, all can produce adverse results.
To achieve a self-assessed score as close as possible to the perfect 10, Elliott recommends this process:
- “Restate your objective.“If you don’t know what your goal was,” he says, “you’ll never know what you should be measuring, or if you succeeded.”
- Determine the type of metric that will determine success. Match measurement to the behaviors and sentiments you hope to see. For instance, “If your goal was energizing [customers], success is defined as lots of people saying positive things about your brand.”
- Identify which metrics you will use for each social-technology platform. “This is when you should get into the specifics of which lines on the report [from] Facebook or Jive … are most important.””
See full Forrester blog post here: http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2009/11/why-are-marketers-so-bad-at-measuring-social-media.html
