One of the frustrations I have with the discussions that swirl around social media is that there’s a big, big difference between something that’s difficult, and something that takes work. Social media and specifically measuring and tracking its impact is not difficult. It’s time consuming. It’s meticulous, and takes thought and insight. But it’s not hard.

And as Katie Paine said to me today on Twitter: “Just because you can’t automate it doesn’t mean it’s not measurable.”

We demand far too many shortcuts. We want just-add-water strategies that don’t require us to do much work but rather roll out some kit of parts we can just plug into place. We’re busy, overtasked, under supported, and the idea of having to dig deep into something in excruciating detail with painstaking effort makes our skin crawl.

But it’s reality.

Results from business are rarely achieved easily. And as much as we’d like to use case studies as a template for what *we* should do, the truth is that someone else’s approach (much less that approach distilled into a two-page PDF) is often not going to line up with our business. We have different people, culture, infrastructure, customers, processes, challenges, priorities.  But we want to look to case studies as the way to reduce the variables and decrease the likelihood – at least in our head – that we might fail.

That doesn’t work, either. At least in terms of delivering to us the nuts and bolts of how to create a strategy, set goals, and measure impact. That, my friends, is all on us.

If there is no road map handed to you for how to measure your social media efforts (and there won’t be), you must create it. That means:

• Setting goals that are measurable in the first place.
• Understanding that impact doesn’t always mean something goes up (like sales or eyeballs). Sometimes it can be that something goes down (like costs of customer service or traditional marketing costs).
• Benchmarking, which means measuring where you are NOW relative to your goals so you can track future progress and impact. This takes time, but you can’t ever determine results if you don’t know where you started.
• Understanding that social media may not be the sales channel itself, but that there are a pile of ways it IMPACTS sales, and measuring those is key.
• Knowing that determining ROI is ultimately about doing the math between dollars in and dollars out.
• Learning the art and science of correlation of data, so you can tie your efforts in one area of the business to the results and impacts they have elsewhere.
• Realizing that software can give you the data and even help you crunch numbers, but you need to engage your brain to make it valuable to your work. There is no substitute for human analysis, ever.

If you’re still saying to me that it’s too hard, that means that you don’t have the mechanisms in place to measure well, or you don’t have a handle on what you should be measuring because your goals aren’t clear, or you don’t know where that information lives inside your company. All of those are NOT an indication that measurement is hard. They’re an indication that you have some work to do to build the foundation for measurement.

And here’s my harsh statement for the day: If you aren’t willing to expend the time, effort, and resources to do this properly and comprehensively, you have no room to complain to me when you’re unsuccessful. You cannot blame the medium for your failure to execute.

So I’m focusing on measurement here, but the same philosophy applies to the strategic planning or tactical and execution work. It’s called work for a reason. And if achieving your goals for growth, revenue, awareness, happy customers, and a thriving business are worth setting in the first place, aren’t they worth working for?

Tucking my soapbox under the bed for the day…

photo credit: dmahendra

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
The Difference Between Hard and Hard Work

• You need to join the conversation
• It’s about relationships (or people)
• It’s not about the tools
• You need to be listening
• Transparency
• Authenticity

Can you come up with illustrative ways to describe it’s value without resorting to the lingo and buzzwords we’ve already beat to death?

One of the powerful elements of social media has been that it strips away many of the artificial trappings that have weighed down marketing and communications for decades.

We got mired in our lingo quicksand in that traditional, push communications world. We got lost talking about brand attributes and key messages and talking points and brand promises and all those terms, and we forgot what they meant. We lived and died by our contrived, scripted fallbacks, and often propped up buzzwords in place of real strategy and action.

Are we in danger of doing it again?

It’s more than just being an echo chamber. It’s getting lazy about how we describe and discuss what it is we’re trying to do here. When we stop looking for new ways to illustrate the importance of social communication, when we’re not committed enough to find new stories to tell or ways to describe the validity of bridging customers to companies, we’ve already lost.

We talk that this space is in its infancy, that we’re merely scratching the surface. So why on earth are we willing to already fall back on cliches and tired turns of phrase to support such a groundbreaking movement, such an upheaval in the way that businesses and their customers talk to and about each other? These phrases don’t *say* anything. Give me articulate points about how this moves the ball down the field for my business. Talk to me about benefits and progress.

I’m challenging myself to keep looking for new insights and angles to highlight the potential of what we’re exploring here. I’m pointing to the bricklaying work and trying to be an example for same so that I don’t become a collection of soundbites but rather a lab for real trial and error.

I know we need descriptors, ways to articulate the importance and value of social communication. But it can’t stop with the words. Let’s not rest on our all-too-new laurels and think that we’ve already found the best way to talk about what it is we are passionate about. I don’t want to settle. Do you?

Photo credit: rs-foto

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
The Quicksand of Social Media Buzzwords

Your Metrics Should Vary

As you embark on this list, you ought to work backwards. Start with your objective in mind, and from there, work back toward the measures and metrics most likely to drive toward that goal and support the intelligence you hope to gather. Measure those. You can’t and shouldn’t measure everything. You should measure the indicators and drivers of what you want to accomplish.

What You Might Measure

Revenue and Business Development: (benchmark before and after SM initiatives begin)

• Speed/length of sales cycle
• Number or % of Repeat customers
• % of Customer Retention
• Number of customer referrals (new business), net number of new leads
• Transaction value per customer
• Customer lifetime value
• Conversions from blog/email subs to leads or customers
• Website conversions for leads or sales
• Organic search rankings > converted leads
• % of Converted leads from online vs. offline sources

Potential Cost Savings:

• Shorter customer service/issue resolution time
• % of issues resolved via offline vs. online channels
• Number of support calls before/after outreach effort
• Recruiting costs through online presence (vs. recruiters)
• Training costs
• % of quarterly or annual customer/account turnover
• Overhead costs for communication (measure costs of online outreach vs. analog as compared to resolution ratios)
• Number/ ratio of viable community-driven product ideas
• Length of concept-to-development cycle (use of online community as testing/focus/idea development)

Value, Awareness, Influence

• Brand Loyalty
• Sentiment of posts online – advocates, detractors
• Share of conversation/voice
• Number and frequency of mentions in media (online or print)
• Net Promoter Score (likelihood of recommendation)
• Subscribers to blog/email/newsletter
• Comments/engagement on posted material, downloads of ebooks, etc. (interaction with content)
• Inbound links to site/blog (total as well as on-topic/relevant)
• Number of Tags, votes, social bookmarks
• Fans/followers/group members for social profiles (implication of a brand following)

A note about Cause and Influence:

For all the metrics you track, you have to realize that the path from initial contact to desired result is a winding one when it comes to marketing. Direct marketing efforts like “get postcard, enter code, buy said product” are more obviously causal and can outline a clear sales path. But in a social and online world where there are literally hundreds of touchpoints in effect at any given point, metrics themselves don’t indicate success or failure.

In most cases, it’s a combination of several factors – need, awareness, cost, sentiment, reputation, availability – that drive a business/purchase decision. So what you’re really after is not “we do X and Y happens”. What you’re after is a combination of both qualitative and quantitative measurements that – in combination over time – increase the likelihood that when a revenue decision is on the table, your business is the likely recipient. Individual metrics are snapshots of behavior, but what you’re striving for is a stronger, more consistent tie with your business for the long term.

Make no mistake that value-based metrics are as important as numbers-based ones. Awareness and loyalty aren’t immediate, but they add to the whole. In this great post by Dave Evans of ClickZ, he says (emphasis mine):

“Rather than planning a campaign with defined start and end dates and a certain spend that’s guaranteed to produce a specified exposure (reach and frequency), social media is an ongoing effort that builds and converges toward an objective. By understanding what’s happening now on the social Web and measuring over time, you can see the trend emerge. The dynamic trend, rather than static measures like reach and frequency, becomes the quantitative guidepost for your social media program.“

My Last Word…For Now

I’m going to take the last bit of this mammoth post to say something critically important. Every single metric above – every single one – is tied to something else that doesn’t have it’s own metric. It’s the strength of the relationships between people. That’s nearly impossible to put on any kind of yardstick, but it’s the underpinning of ALL of these things. Better relationships drive better business, period. You may not be able to measure the relationships themselves, but all of the metrics above are indications – the results, if you will – of how well you’ve cultivated those relationships on a human level.

So what do you think? What other metrics do you use? Still want to tell me that social media isn’t measurable?

Photo Credit: Charlyn W on Flickr

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Get A Yardstick