CONCLUSIONS Paper
Five Best Practices for
Social Media Measurement
How to link social media metrics to business results
Insights from the webinar, Less Talk + More Action = Better Results, in the Measure What Matters: Redefining Marketing Success in the Digital
Age series, presented in association with the American Marketing
Association and SAS
Featuring:
Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners
John Bastone, Global Customer and Media Intelligence Manager at SAS
Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
1
If there’s anyone out there who still believes social media doesn’t warrant serious consideration, consider some basic facts: There are more than
750 million active users on Facebook, 140 million unique visitors to the site each month, 200 million registered Twitter users, and more than 100 million professionals on LinkedIn.
That’s just for starters. In addition to social networking sites, there are blogs, comments on traditional media and e-commerce websites, review sites such as ConsumerSearch and Epinion, content-sharing sites such as YouTube and
Flickr, and collaborative projects such as Wikipedia.
Nearly half of Americans now get their news from the Web. One in five reads blogs. More than 80 percent of Americans use social media in some fashion each month.
Some of those people just might be talking about your brand – and your competition. Some may be ambassadors and advocates, or they may just as easily be detractors and malcontents – but all their voices are in the mix, shaping customers’ buying decisions. Who would want to ignore it?
However, in this age of accountability, can you be sure that investments in social media are worth it?
Can you prove the bottom-line value of this ephemeral new media?
Social Media: Driving Profits or Just Popularity?
“Accountability has never been more important in marketing,” said John Bastone,
Global Customer and Media Intelligence Manager at SAS. “It isn’t just about increasing awareness anymore; it’s about what we are doing to drive profitable revenue growth.
In my role at SAS, I speak to a lot of customers and at a lot of conferences about the benefits of data-driven insights across a wide spectrum of technologies, such as campaign management, search engine optimization or Web analytics. Nothing has generated more buzz – or brought more scrutiny – than the topic of social media, specifically how to get more value out of that channel.”
Organizations often do not reap the value they should from social media, for several reasons:
• It is not being used very effectively. In an informal webcast poll, nearly 60 percent of audience members said their organizations are ineffective in their use of social media. Another third think they’re getting there. Only one in 10 claimed their organizations were doing a good job of it.
■ If anyone still believes social media is just an online playground for egocentric chatter, look at the role that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have played in mobilizing protests in the Arab revolutions of late. The ability to connect and communicate over new media has even reshaped the dynamics of international rebellion, so just think what it might do for your business.
■ “Social media is the preferred contact channel for many people these days. A lot of outbound marketing and sales effort happens through Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn. More than half of my clients never respond to an email but will respond immediately to a
Facebook comment, message or tweet. Call a client by phone, and it might take three days for a return call, but that same client might respond immediately on Twitter.”
Katie Delahaye Paine,
CEO of KDPaine & Partners
Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
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Those figures align with the results of a recent survey of more 2,100 senior marketers, conducted by SAS with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services
(The New Conversation: Taking Social Media from Talk to Action, October 2010).
The study found that the use of social media was stronger in certain segments – such as retail, organizations with more than 10,000 employees, and the computer services and professional services sectors.
• Risks are magnified on social media. Bad practices in traditional media marketing are just as bad on social media – except the mistakes can reach more people faster and create more damage. Consider Kenneth Cole’s misstep in a widely derided tweet about unrest in Egypt. Or Edelman and Wal-Mart’s gaffes in creating fake blogs. Or the pervasive habit among marketers to use social media for screaming without listening.
• Social media has been mostly about intangible effects. When asked to name the primary benefits social media has brought to their organizations, most respondents in the study pointed to increased awareness, website traffic and favorable perceptions of the organization.
Awareness. Hits. Happy thoughts. That’s all fine and well. It’s gratifying if consumers
“like” you. But do they buy? Do they recommend? Does all this awareness, website traffic and goodwill translate into dollars and profits?
For most organizations, the answer is, “Hmm, we don’t really know.” In a webcast poll,
70 percent of respondents said their organizations did a poor job linking social media efforts to profits. When asked the most pressing challenges they face or anticipate facing with social media, shortfalls in this area topped the multiple-choice list:
• 41 percent — Understanding the potential of social media to make a difference in the business.
• 40 percent — Measuring the effectiveness of social media activities.
• 31 percent — Linking social media activities to an impact on company financials and/or ROI.
No surprises there, said Bastone. “Organizations realize the benefits of social media as it relates to awareness, but now the question is how to link this to tangible value in the company in a way that starts to justify the investment.”
Becoming Effective with Social Media:
Three Areas of Focus
To evolve from “ineffective” to “effective” in social media requires organizations to focus on three areas, said Bastone: listening to the conversations that are out there, processing the structured and unstructured (text) data available from social media channels – and then doing something about it.
Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
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1. Listen
Organizations need to grow a bigger set of ears, said Bastone, borrowing the phrase from colleague and social media guru Chris Brogan. “If you want to find out what customers think about you, there’s a ton of data out there on message boards, review sites and discussion forums. You need to become more aware of these alternate sources and pull them into your monitoring efforts. At the same time, you need to be able to filter out the irrelevant content in a very standard, repeatable way.”
Use social media scanning tools to find out what people are saying. Listen for public relations opportunities, marketing opportunities and customer service needs. Track the sentiments in conversations. Align all of this to internal metrics. For example, how many customer service complaints are you finding via the Web?
Look deeper than the conversations du jour, Bastone advised: “It’s not enough to listen to just the last seven days or 30 days of commentary. Your listening and measurement efforts should start to accumulate a year or two years of sentiment, so you can see trends and understand whether a shift in sentiment is significant or seasonal.” 2. Process
Taken at face value, the social media data you collect will be only marginally useful – just figures that tell you what was, but not necessarily what that means, or what to do about it. With analytics, this data can be processed to deliver useful insight:
• Descriptive statistics clarify activity and trends, such as how many followers you have, how many reviews were generated on Facebook, and which channels are being used most often.
• Social network analysis follows the links between friends, fans and followers to identify connections of influence as well as the biggest sources of influence.
• Text analytics examine the content in online conversations to identify themes, sentiments and connections that would not be revealed by casual surveillance.
The text analytics part of it is an emerging science with exciting potential. This piece alone has several elements to it:
• Content categorization. The system scans social media content and organizes it into logical categories, said Bastone. “You’d want to be able to say, ‘This is a public relations thread that deals with corporate reputation,’ versus ‘This is a customer service thread that deals with issues of customer satisfaction.’
Organizing content by category is a core piece in being able to triage conversations for routing to the appropriate people in an organization.”
■ “Being in the public domain, social media conversations represent a resource-rich source of customer information – as well as a good source of competitive information.”
John Bastone,
Global Customer and Media Intelligence
Manager at SAS
Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
4
• Text mining. In the same way that you can use data mining to explore data in your databases and establish relationships, you can now do the same thing to all those unstructured text documents. You can dig around in volumes of emails, Facebook comments, consumer reviews and more, and look for themes, connected concepts and volumes of conversation.
“Visualization tools make it easy to see what people are talking about right now, what issues are hot and which are not,” said Bastone. “So you don’t necessarily have to know what you’re looking for, to understand what is important right now.”
• Sentiment analysis. This form of natural language processing looks at how people use words and phrases in context, and then assigns a sentiment – positive, negative or neutral – based on the words people use. You can classify and categorize the sentiments in online content, look at trends over time, and see significant differences in the way people speak either positively or negatively about you – and your competition.
3. Respond
There are two elements to this: responding internally and externally.
Share with your audience. Comment on blogs and participate in conversations – and not just to hawk your product or service. Be visible, be where the community is, answer questions, reply to emails, offer help, funnel complaints into the customer service workflow, and build relationships with bloggers. Publish useful, informational and responsive content via blogs, online newsletters, photos, slide decks and videos.
Act and adapt. Insights from social media should be embedded in business processes, said Bastone. “All this listening and processing are ultimately about being in a better position to acknowledge and respond to issues that are coming in through social channels in real time or near-real time, being able to change your underlying business processes in response to positive and negative sentiment that’s coming in through your social channels, and ultimately integrating that into everything you do.”
Five Best Practices to Get the Most from Social
Media Measurement
1. Consider all the ways social media can drive profits.
“Social media as a channel tends to be most strongly aligned with marketing or marketing communications,” said Bastone, “but its impact is reverberating across the enterprise. Many different groups have a vested interest.”
Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
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The most obvious business functions that can benefit from social media tracking include:
• Online media analysis. Where are consumers talking about you? How is volume trending? Who are the most influential sources? Which sites are more positive?
Negative?
• Brand and market tracking. What do consumers say about your brand, your products and your competition? What is the impact of these discussions? Who are the influencers?
• Public relations and reputation tracking. What are online journalists and bloggers saying about your organization? What is the threat to your reputation?
Where are the opportunities to build advocacy?
• Customer feedback management. How do perceptions voiced on social media compare to direct customer feedback from other sources? Are there issues that require response or resolution?
The key is to create business processes whereby information from social media is translated into action. Customer complaints should be funneled to a customer care center. An identified need can be routed to a sales contact. An influential blogger can be referred to the public relations department as a potential new media contact.
2. Know what you want out of social media.
Define the R in your ROI. To be able to prove the ROI, you have to have a tangible business goal to begin with, said Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners.
What is the return that you’re hoping to deliver? Why are you doing this? What is the problem you are trying to solve?
Define the audience. Who are you really trying to reach? It’s one thing to go out there and reach 57 million people, but that’s not very meaningful if those 57 million people are not really your target market. Home Depot may reach the world with their social media presence, but if the closest Home Depot store is 70 miles away, you’ve got to have a lot of loyalty and engagement to win that part of the audience as customers.
“You need to be brutally honest about your target audience and whether you are in fact reaching them,” said Paine.
Establish benchmarks. “Everyone tears their hair out and says, ‘There are no benchmarks in social media.’ But that’s not really true; there are. There’s always your competition – your peers – that you can benchmark against,” said Paine. Instead of asking how much positive sentiment you have, you’d want to know your share of positive sentiment amid all positive sentiment in the marketplace. Conversely, if your business operates in a controversial area, you could gauge your relative - rather than absolute - share of negative sentiment.
■ “Some online conversations are relevant to marketing, public relations and sales, but just as many are relevant to customer service, competitive intelligence, human resources, investor relations, product development – or anywhere else in the organization where it’s meaningful to listen to customers.”
Katie Delahaye Paine,
CEO of KDPaine & Partners
Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
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Define your Kick Butt Index. “What do your bosses define as ‘kicking butt?’” asked
Paine. Find out what causes them to say “Congratulations, you are really kicking butt out there,” or “Hey, we’re really getting our butt kicked.” What are those metrics? If executives agree to this up front, you have a tangible way of proving the value later, said Paine: “You can say, ‘We agreed the metric we were going to be judged on was cost per new customer acquired. That number was $67 a year ago; it is $37 today, so
I am in fact kicking butt.’”
3. Make it a two-way conversation.
“Marketers are having to make an adjustment to account for the fact that the ‘social’ part of social media demands a give and take,” said Bastone. “As online conversations about your business are happening, you need to not just talk about yourself, but engage people in a two-way conversation.”
Paine agreed: “The first thing you have got to understand is this: It’s not about you.
Too many marketers think social media is basically just another way to get the word out, when in fact it’s a very different entity. The entity is the conversation.”
There are lots of ways to use social media not just as a way to get the word out there, but to touch customers and interact in ways that you couldn’t do before, said
Paine. Savvy marketers will use social media to engage customers with the brand on a personal level, conduct customer meetings, gather feedback through surveys and focus groups, and identify opportunities for business development.
When Paine posted on Facebook that she was planning to build a brick walkway that weekend, she received a comment from Home Depot with a link to an instructional video about how to build brick walkways. By offering to help as a trusted advisor – rather than making an overt sales pitch – Home Depot ended up scoring the bricksand- mortar sale … literally.
4. Forget about impressions and hits.
“For too long, we have been focused on counting eyeballs, and there is no way to count eyeballs effectively, consistently, or accurately in social media,” said Paine. “So just give it up.”
Half of your Twitter followers are robo-followers; they’re not real anyway. You may know how many people like your Facebook page, but how many are paying any attention to what you post there? Even the sites/services that track hits, visitors and impressions are doing it inconsistently.
“I say ‘hits’ stands for ‘how idiots track success,’” said Paine. “If all you’re doing is counting hits, you’re not tracking anything that is meaningful in today’s marketplace.”
■ “The first thing you have got to understand is this: It’s not about you.
Too many marketers think social media is basically just another way to get the word out, when in fact it’s a very different entity. The entity is the conversation.” Katie Delahaye Paine,
CEO of KDPaine & Partners
Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
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Paine defined a five-level hierarchy of measurements, with each tier offering progressively more engagement – a more meaningful measure of how well you’re doing with social media.
At the lowest level are the simple, descriptive facts comparable to “impressions” in traditional media: how many followers, friends, likes, visitors, hits, comments, etc.
“Impressions are a zero level of engagement,” said Paine. “You don’t care how many eyeballs you reach; you care what those eyeballs have done,” which brings us to the next level.
“Did they go to your site? Did they click through from the link you gave them? I classify likes as a Level 1, because it’s so easy to hit that like button,” said Paine. “My metric is not how many likes there are, but how many likes there are relative to how many people actually engaged in conversations on the site. Maybe 98,000 are likes, but if only 20 or 30 people are actually engaging in conversations, that’s not exactly a high level of engagement.”
Most organizations are measuring at the more participatory Level 2 or 3, said Paine.
“If you are really good at getting engagement levels up there, you’ll get people who retweet, repeat comments and share posts. That’s a very high level of engagement.
Ultimately (Level 4) you want their identity; you want them to register in some form, say nice things about your brand, and (Level 5) make a purchase and recommend you to others.” As you move up the levels, the numbers will likely be small for now. It’s important to set management expectations appropriately. The absolute numbers – how many click-throughs or visitors – are not nearly as important as what percentage of people are moving up the levels. From month to month, as social media followers and friends move from Level 1 to Level 2 and up, you’ll know how well you are doing in getting people to engage with the brand.
■ “ If you just take the customer satisfaction score – ‘Did you like the lobby?’ ‘Did you like the guest room?’
– guests may not be able to pinpoint the thing that made them feel that way.
If you are evaluating the design through some kind of analysis, you need specifics about what is creating that perception, and that’s challenging.”
Stephani Robson, PhD,
Senior Lecturer, Cornell School of Hotel Administration
8
Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
5. Blend social media data with internal data.
“Social media is a hot channel for understanding and interpreting online conversations, but it isn’t the only source of conversations,” Bastone noted. “If you really want to evaluate sentiment, conversations, topics, what people care about or don’t care about, it doesn’t make sense to analyze social conversations in one silo and other customer communications in a completely different silo.
“It gets really interesting when you start to blend social media data with internal data, such as the sentiment captured from call centers, surveys, customer service records, behavioral data, online chat and customer emails.” Supplement with external customer research, brand research and Web analytics to create an even richer view of the customer. “Bringing this all together gives you a common lens to understand customer conversations and sentiment – and a much better handle on leading indicators,” said
Bastone. “If an uptick happens across channels, that is a more reliable insight” to use as the basis for forecasting and other business decisions.
Closing Thoughts
Marketers talk about “going where the fish are,” but traditional methods are notoriously inefficient for getting there, said Paine.
First, there’s demographics. “You say, ‘OK, I have a fish that is this long and this wide and purple, and I know that statistically, 70 percent of all women between the ages of 18 and 55 like this particular fish.’ Then you send them an email or a junk mail or something. The reality is that they don’t care. They really don’t care. Consider this:
• 44 percent of junk mail goes into landfills unopened.
• Response rates of less than 0.25 percent are now considered acceptable.
• On average, less than 1 percent of all emails are opened and acted upon.
So using demographics is not a very efficient way to reach your target audience.”
What about traditional mass media? Inefficient fishing as well, says Paine. Suppose you run a lawn care company that puts an ad in a paper that reaches 50,000 people in a geographic area. You’ll reach potential customers who are so far away that, with the high price of gas these days, you’d be losing money on their business. Among customers within a certain radius, perhaps half don’t even have lawns, and half of the remaining prospects actually prefer to mow their own lawns. Ultimately the target market is a small subset of the larger audience you paid good advertising money to reach.
Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
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“In reality, you want to help the people whose lawns are unkempt,” said Paine.
“You’d want to drive around the neighborhood and just contact people whose lawns are a mess and say, ‘I can help you.’ That’s what engagement in social media enables you to do. It enables you to identify somebody who has a problem, and earn their trust and loyalty.”
If you do that well with social media, can you prove it? Yes. Thanks to new search and analysis tools created for social media, you can connect click-throughs that lead to sales. You can track changes in sentiment in discussions about your organization.
You can correlate sales to social media channels and campaigns. You can show the
ROI.
“Conversations have always been going on – around the water cooler, in front of the television set, and in the aisles of your grocery store and everywhere on the planet,” said Paine. “They’ve always been going on, it’s just that we never were able to track them before. Now we can.”
About the Presenters
Katie Delahaye Paine,
CEO of KDPaine & Partners
Katie Paine is the CEO and founder of KDPaine & Partners LLC and author of
Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator’s Guide to Success and The Complete How-To Guide to Measuring Social Media. Paine also writes the first blog and first newsletter dedicated entirely to measurement and accountability.
In the last two decades, she and her firm have listened to millions of conversations, analyzed thousands of articles, and asked hundreds of questions in order to help her clients better understand their relationships with their constituencies. Learn more about Paine at www.kdpaine.com.
John Bastone,
Global Customer and Media Intelligence Manager at SAS
John Bastone is an integral part of SAS’ Global Customer Intelligence Product
Marketing organization. With more than 15 years of experience performing marketing, computer programming, consulting and analytics roles for companies such as Verizon
Data Services and Catalina Marketing, his areas of expertise are behavior-based marketing and social media analytics. Learn more about Bastone at www.linkedin.com/in/johnbastone. ■ “There are technology solutions that sift through huge volumes of online conversations, parse textual data to discern sentiment and share of conversation, map sentiment to business issues and track click-through paths to your website. These tools are enabling progressive companies to do a very good job in showing the ROI.”
John Bastone,
Global Customer and Media Intelligence
Manager at SAS
10
Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
To view the on-demand recording of the webcast: http://www.sas.com/reg/web/ corp/1291086 For more on SAS® Social Media Analytics: http://www.sas.com/sma
To view other AMA webcasts: www.MarketingPower.com/webcasts
To view the SAS and Harvard Business Review Analytic Services research paper, The
New Conversation: Taking Social Media from Talk to Action: www.tiny.cc/amasas
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