The past few years have brought an explosion of tool vendors and platform choices to social media listening and measurement. Today, there are well over 100 tool vendors vying for your attention and dollars. Tools are important, but in the grand cosmos of social media measurement, they are being overemphasized, sometimes at the expense of proper measurement discipline. We are letting tools decide what we can measure without giving sufficient thought to what we should measure.
There are several steps and decisions that should be addressed prior to selecting a tool or suite of tools. Following these steps will allow you to arrive at the tool selection decision with a solid understanding of the metrics and data requirements you need to address with the selected tool.
â–¶ Write objectives that are measurable and aligned. Proper social media objectives should be measurable and aligned with desired organizational outcomes. In order to be measurable, your objectives should indicate the desired change in the metric of interest and the time frame by which the change will occur. Social media objectives not only define what we need to measure, they also suggest broad parameters that the measurement program, and ultimately the tool decision, must operate within.
â–¶ Understand the business process addressed. In addition to having objectives that are aligned with organizational or business outcomes, it is essential to understand the specific business process the social media program will address or drive. If the program is marketing oriented, the sales funnel process—awareness, consideration, preference, sales and loyalty—may be most appropriate. B2B companies might be well-served by aligning their social media efforts with the lead generation process. Other business processes commonly addressed by social media programs include customer service and support, brand building and corporate reputation.
â–¶ Metrics flow from processes and objectives. Understanding the requisite business process that the social media program is driving is crucial because each process drives specific metrics. For example, the sales funnel process drives a specific metrics set such as:
• Percentage of unaided or aided awareness
• Percentage of the target audience who would consider the product/company
• Percentage who prefer the product/company
• Incremental sales revenues
• Percentage who would purchase the product again or the number/amount of repeat purchases
For B2B companies, the lead generation process would drive a different set of metrics. In addition to the business process metric sets, there are other program-specific metrics you will want to address. A comprehensive measurement program contains metrics that address the interim steps or stages necessary to reach the higher-level business process objectives.
Exposure or engagement-oriented metrics are two examples. Understanding how the social media program drives a business process is also important to our ability to describe the impact or, in some cases, ROI the program has created.
â–¶ Data sets are crucial. Each metric has data requirements, usually two pieces of data per metric. Examine the set of metrics you have defined for your social media program. Catalogue all the specific pieces of data you need to compute the various metrics. For example, the data needed for basic sales funnel metrics might include:
• Number of individuals in the target audience
• Number of survey respondents
• Number of respondents “aware” of the product/company
• Number of respondents who would consider/seriously consider purchasing the product/service
• Number of individuals purchasing the product
• Total number of purchasing transactions
• Amount of sales revenue attributable to the program
Now bring on those tools. Armed with an understanding of all the data needed to calculate the metrics required to measure the social media program, you will be able to assess which tools best deliver the data and metrics you need.
By addressing the steps leading up to tool selection, you will be able to make a more informed tool decision. PRN
[Editor’s Note: Don Bartholomew will be a speaker at PR News’ How-To Conference on Dec. 1, 2010.]
CONTACT:
Don Bartholomew is VP of Digital Research for Fleishman-Hillard, and a member of the Measurement Commission of the Institute for PR. He can be reached at [email protected].