Social Media - Are You / How Are You Measuring Your Organization's Success?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by John Cass on January 15, 2009 at 10:53am

use of social media for promotion is definitely a goal for companies but I'd argue the strategy for achieving that goal is not one of advertising or pitch but conversation about topics that are of interest to a customer and community.

Innovation management - listening to ideas, and taking action or not on those ideas
Customer service - solving a customer's issues.
Crisis communications - resolving issues in the public sphere
Thought leadership - starting the discussion, engaging other thought leaders, and starting a dialogue.

Having said this, I think you can use some of the basic metrics any good web strategist would use in measurement. Unique visitors, page views, putting a call to action, and tracking the conversions. Beyond your own website, you can also track the number of friends in a social networking site, or the number of followers. I think AMA Boston can say our social media networking efforts are really paying off, we have over 500 members on connect, and over 900 members on the linkedin ama boston group. Not all of the connect members and linkedin members are AMA members, but I think by providing a forum in both places to talk about marketing issues and the profession we are going to be successful. It is my understanding that as our numbers of subscribers of members has increased, our general membership has grown. That's another measurement process linking data in social media with what's happening with conversions.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Angela Olesen Seggie on January 15, 2009 at 11:42am

Yes, your example of the AMA is a good one ... good correlation between subscribers and general membership. Definitely a measure of success. And, my question is what are companies doing with the data and metrics after they get it?

Whether you're using Social Media for promotion or topics of interest, or you're not using Social Media at all -- if you're a sizeable organization that interacts with the public, people are talking about you and to you.

An example of what I'm getting at is the following: during the ice storm last month, people in NH were communicating with the power (PSNH) and cable company (Comcast) on Twitter. There was both positive and negative feedback on their customer service and response rate to the outages. And, they used Twitter as one way to the update the public on the status of the fixes. In that case, the conversation was about a topic of interest driven outside of the company that created an opportunity for the organizations to respond. I wonder what Comcast is doing to measure their response, whether people are more or less likely to continue to subscribe to their services given their response, what they've gained as a result of the conversation, and whether there was any change in their business as a result.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Stephanie Tilton on February 20, 2009 at 5:21pm

Hi Angela,
I'm a freelancer so I can't comment on any one organization, but I do know that Scout Labs recently launched tools to help companies monitor discussions about their brands across social networks and other free-form media. See: http://bit.ly/aMfpI

Also, MarketingSherpa posted an interesting article positing that marketers obsessed with tracking social media results quantitatively are missing the point. http://budurl.com/p5m7

Hope this helps!
Stephanie

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Jamie Bull on June 2, 2009 at 7:49pm

I think that social media marketers are too eager to create special metrics just for social media programs. Somewhere along the line, someone convinced a lot of people that social media couldn't drive "real" business metrics.

Ultimately, what are the conversations supposed to drive? Better quality sales leads? More web traffic? Better search engine rankings?

Connect your social media conversations back to the metrics that you are already following, and keep tracking those.

▶ Reply to This