Bon's Mots

The short an­swer is yes.

The long an­swer is a bit more com­pli­cated. The ques­tion was the fo­cus of this week’s Third Tuesday Toronto (which ac­tu­ally took place on a Tuesday!). A panel of ex­perts in so­cial me­dia mea­sure­ment and web an­a­lyt­ics as­sem­bled to tackle this con­tentious is­sue: how do you mea­sure some­thing that is so fluid and, as yet, undefined?

The ex­perts were: Katie Paine, pres­i­dent of KD Paine and Partners, a com­pany that helps its clients mea­sure the suc­cess of their com­mu­ni­ca­tions cam­paigns; Marshall Sponder, a se­nior web an­a­lyst at Monster​.com, mem­ber of the Board of Directors of the Web Analytics Association (WAA) for Social Media and The Analytics Guru; and Marcel Lebrun, President of Radian6, a com­pany that pro­vides mon­i­tor­ing and analy­sis tools for so­cial me­dia to PR professionals.

This is what I took out of the discussion:

• Before so­cial me­dia can be mea­sured, you have to de­cide on your busi­ness goal. Does it in­volve im­prov­ing cus­tomer ser­vice? If so, fo­cus on the num­ber of com­ments on your company’s web­site, per­haps, or what is be­ing said about you in the bl­o­gos­phere. If your goal is to in­crease sales, find out how many peo­ple are flog­ging your prod­uct or ser­vice; you could try to cor­re­late that with your ad­ver­tis­ing or mar­ket­ing campaigns.

• There is no stan­dard, no “magic bul­let.” Social me­dia is in its early state and re­mains un­de­fined. Sponder iden­ti­fies a need for stan­dards among so­cial me­dia mea­sure­ment to en­act best prac­tices and bench­marks. (This is sim­i­lar to the MRP stan­dard for tra­di­tional me­dia monitoring.)

• Traditional mea­sure­ment cri­te­ria, such as tone, cir­cu­la­tion and promi­nence, are dif­fi­cult to ap­ply to so­cial me­dia; dif­fer­ent pa­ra­me­ters are needed. If PR is about build­ing re­la­tion­ships with au­di­ences, and so­cial me­dia fa­cil­i­tates this, then it fol­lows that we should mea­sure the con­ver­sa­tions that are hap­pen­ing. Are they positive?

• In Paine’s ex­pe­ri­ence, boards of di­rec­tors are dri­ving the de­mand for so­cial me­dia mea­sure­ment. They are los­ing con­trol of their brands to their cus­tomers and want to pre­vent DellHell-like in­ci­dents from hap­pen­ing at their or­ga­ni­za­tions. The most im­por­tant way to mea­sure is to lis­ten — to your cus­tomers, your com­peti­tors, the in­dus­try. Learn from be­ing engaged.

The ba­sic premise is to mea­sure so­cial me­dia for the re­la­tion­ships, not the num­bers. Find out if your au­di­ence is talk­ing about you, what they are say­ing and how many peo­ple are join­ing in the conversation.