The Ocean Agency

Today I had the pleasure of attending the second Social Media Breakfast in Chicago. The Social Media breakfast is a great event organized by Scott Bishop, Craig Bagdon, and Mike Pilarz.  The event is a great chance to network with others who are immersed in social media, and a great place to learn from peers.

Personally, I am fascinated by social media measurement. Now, that may be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written on paper, but it’s true. Social Media measurement is essential to ensure that our campaigns are meeting their objectives and that our clients are happy. Measurement allows us to troubleshoot, tweak, and drastically improve campaigns.

I was lucky enough to be placed on the social media measurement panel ( seriously, I was quite excited) and it was moderated by an extremely knowledgeable industry veteran: Tery Spataro. Tery has been involved in the social media space long before it was called social media, and has directed campaigns for Volvo and Hormel among others.

Tery had some great ideas, and I’ll run through them quickly:

1) Measurement starts with objectives. You need to keep those objectives simple and straightforward, set tactics to help you reach those objectives, and then define your metrics.

Defining metrics before determining an objective hurts any campaign. A client may tell an agency that they want 1,000 facebook fans, but is that actually an objective, or is it a metric? Isn’t the real objective to build engagement around your brand?

2) Benchmarks are important, and anything social takes time.

If you’re a business, you constantly hear the success stories of big brands with social media. While these stories are great, the reality is that social campaigns, like any WOM campaign, take time. It takes time to build relationships in real life, and, in a world where online networking reflects offline networking more and more, relationship building takes both time and effort.

3) Hard data does exist in the social media space!

Beyond soft metrics like engagement, you can redirect traffic from social sites to separate landing pages on your website with analytics installed. This allows you to see exactly how many visitors you are getting from a variety of sites. For those who are really interested in translating social media into dollars and cents, there is also the cost per acquisition model.

The cost per acquisition model refers to how much money you have spent to build up a certain number of followers, engagements, or friends. Think about it this way, if you spent $100,000 to build out a blog and aren’t getting traffic or readers, your CPA isn’t very good. However, if you put $100 into Twitter, and you have 100,000 followers, you CPA is something you should be pretty proud of.

My personal opinion:

Social media monitoring and measurement is increasingly important, but the measurement tools haven’t quite caught up to the soical networking technologies–yet. There are plenty of tools out there, blog monitoring software, Twitter monitoring software, and social conversation trackers. This data combined with traditional web analytics can give us a fairly complete picture of an online presence, but it still leaves something to be desired.

Think about the possibility for behavioral tracking with all of these social networks. The possibilities for data collection and measurement are endless, we just need to better understand how to collect and analyze data.

What do you see as the future of social media measurement? What tools are you utilizing now that are especially powerful?