Edelman academic summit, part 2: measurement

One of the first topics to come up, and the one that kept coming up at the summit, was measurement. I must admit that since my research training is in historical methods, this is my weakest area in understanding social media. Nonetheless, my acquaintance with Katie Paine keeps it front and center in my brain, so I took good notes during the "Monitoring and Measuring Conversations" session with Marcel LeBrun and Sean Moffitt.

Marcel started by identifying the top 10 conversations to monitor.

10. The Complaint –respond quickly and transparently, opportunity to impress with great service

9. The Compliment – say thank you, return the favor, save it (ie del.icio.us)

8. The Customer Problem—listen for known or potential customer issues so you can respond prior to the complaint. Proactive service is remarkable.

7.  The Inquiry/Question – as online participation becomes known, customers will ask you Q. they might not otherwise call to ask. Gain insight and promote your strengths—not pitching but answering a Q. others can see

6. Campaign Impact – measure the conversation effect caused by your campaign

5. The Crisis—setup an early warning system by monitoring conversations that could potentially lead to crisis, catch issues before they go viral or mainstream if possible, think about brand’s potential crises now

4. The Competitors—listen to conversations about them, including all conversation types (complaints, questions etc.)

3. The Crowd—Monitor broader industry conversation to identify which related topics garner the most attention and engagement. Participate in the broader “crowd discussion”, be active and timely, track which concepts are resonating and your share of conversation relative to the overall topic

2. The Influencer—community that forms around an influencer helps to spread ideas and opinions faster, calculate and track on-topic influence to ID your topic’s key influencers, participate in the conversation with key influencers and work on building the relationship (from strangers to friends and friends to fans).

1. The Point of Need—track keywords that people might use to express needs that your company can solve, if you meet people at their point of need, you are not interrupting or pitching, you are helping and responding to an expressed need. Lead generation: don’t pitch until you find/hear a point of need. Connect, participate, build, relationship, but don’t pitch.

Then, Sean listed 10 somewhat immutable laws of measuring conversations

• This is not a perfect science
• Social media value is trapped in the Long Tail of its metrics – we measure traffic, unique visitors
• It’s an intimacy medium
• How you measure is influenced by who you are (we can’t agree on one standard—e-commerce is diff from community owner / engagement vs. surveyor who wants competitive insights) Pr often looking for influencers
• Social media outcomes trump traditional media inputs
• Those who measure social media are those who manage social media (CEO key metric is bottom line profits)
• Conversations doen’t just happen in one place anymore-- Where to find data: monitoring tools—Technorati, del.icio.us, Google Analytics, Feedburner, Alexa, Appsholic, Digg, StumbleUpon
• There are 27 types of social media conversations (referencing Katie Paine)--what are you aiming for?

REACH—how far does it go?

RELEVANCE—does it support your intended direction?

INFLUENCE—who shares and with who? How many generations of impact?

AUTHORITY—how trusted is the source?

ENGAGEMENT—how involved do they get?

INTERACTION—did they do anything with it?

VELOCITY—how fast does it travel (viral)

ATTENTION—how much time do they spend?

SENTIMENT—how positive are they?

NET PROMOTER—are they recommending you to others? Would you recommend Brand X to a friend or colleague? (On a scale of 1-10, the formula is "People who say 9-10 (extremely)" minus "those who answer 1-6" = your score). And this is what really matters most.

• Faith goes a long way

Sadly, this only adds up to 9, so I missed a law. (Sorry, Sean.) Then, he provided some good examples: Dell, Stonyfield Farms, Intuit QuickBooks, Southwest, Dove, Firefox, Starbucks Idea, Nike+ community

My favorite part was Sean's "Take it back to the classroom" section, in which he advised us to have our students:

• Join the conversation
• Start a new conversation
• Measure the conversation
• Build insight
• Let the next class work through it—in other words, make a two semester blog requirement so students have to apply what they learned through the measurement to continue to improve their communication skills.

Postscript: after the conference, Katie posted 19 classifications of video, from Advertisement to Videolog.

Comments

[Kelli Matthews]

Karen,

I really wanted to be at the Summit - maybe next year! This is a great summary. Thanks for providing these and giving me some food for thought.

Kelli

[Toby]

Karen - Thanks for posting your notes. I especially love this point - "It’s an intimacy medium." However, as the speakers point out social media goes beyond just a 'feel good.'

[Karen Russell]

Kelli and Toby, glad it came in handy. The speakers had so much to say I couldn't keep up with the notes. But I tried.

[Simon Collister]

Hi Karen. really nice summary here. Thanks. can I ask if you could clarify one of Sean's points? He said "Social media value is trapped in the Long Tail of its metrics – we measure traffic, unique visitors". Surely if we measure traffic in the long tail we will not suee huge volumes. Rather if we measure quality of engagement we should see much greater/better conversations albeit with a smaller number of people. Is that waht he getting at? Any additional info gratefully received. Thanks!

[Karen Russell]

Simon, rather than give you my interpretation, I asked Sean to review your comment, and he was kind enough to reply.

Regarding the "Long Tail of Metrics," Sean wrote, "most of us fall in the trap of justifying social media's existence by traffic/members/visitors, which albeit important, oftentimes we find the real value is trapped in the stuff we don't often attempt to measure - engagement, content, insight, new business, employment hiring, customer support.

"This may be the result of a smaller more enagaged group of people, but by referring to long tail - I meant to use the metaphor to say 'there is just as much benefit collectively in the stuff that has a low incidence of measurement as there is in the conventional metrics.'"

Hope that helps!

[Simon Collister]

Spot on! Thank Karen & Sean.