8. New Practice #8: The Master of the Metrics
Historically, measurement has been a tough practice, even before social media came onto the scene. PR professionals have worked tirelessly to show how public relations can lead to valuable business outcomes for an organization. One of the greatest challenges is to reveal the “tangibles” of PR. However, many professionals decided this translated into impressions (eyeballs) and the value of media coverage, if the coverage were converted to advertising or Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs). Ask any PR measurement professional and you quickly learn how and why you should move beyond the practice of AVEs, once and for all.
According to the Barcelona Principles, which provide a set of standard practices, PR requires goal setting and measurement. The Barcelona Principles state, “Fundamentally important, goals should be as quantitative as possible and address who, what, when, and how much impact is expected from a public relations campaign.” They further discuss how, “Traditional as well as social media should be measured to capture changes in stakeholder awareness, comprehension, attitude, and behavior....We need to think in terms of communities of ‘stakeholders’ as the power of communications shifts from companies and institutions to communities of individuals.” Because of this shift from companies and institutions to individuals, it’s imperative to uphold good measurement practices.1
Social media doesn’t change good PR measurement practices, although it may add to the complexity. The same principles you learned in PR about outcomes (quantifiable changes in attitude or behavior) versus outputs (the tangible elements in your campaign) and the outtakes (the key messages that you want your audience to take away) still hold true. As you discover there are many metrics in social media, you need to show your social media measurement directly ties back to higher-level business goals—that is, reduction in expenses or increase in revenue. The executives of the company who create these business goals look for specific indicators that reveal how the organization’s needle moves toward profitability and a more reputable business in the eyes of the public. At the same time, there are also metrics that expose lower-level community interactions and Return on Participation (ROP), which are important for campaign progress. You can practice good social media measurement by setting up a program to differentiate metrics; one that enables executives to focus on how engagement leads to business outcomes.
According to Katie Paine, author of Measure What Matters (Wiley, March 2011) and CEO of KDPaine & Partners, “The key to good Social Media Measurement is to be clear about the goals. Is the intent to reduce marketing costs? Improve positioning relative to the competition or the marketplace? Shorten the sales cycle? Too often, people ‘do social media’ because it seems like the thing to do. But without clear definitions of success, you have no idea whether you are moving forward or not. What you should be measuring is your performance relative to the marketplace. Social Media is a conversation in that marketplace, and it’s not all about you. You need to understand how you are performing relative to the competition.”
Practice #8, The Master of the Metrics, came to fruition when PR professionals were tasked with showing more measurement and accountability. In an age when social media was first thought of as one big cocktail party, PR professionals must deliver the value social media brings to the organization. Setting up the appropriate metrics and reporting measurement has always been a critical part of your communications strategy. As you plan a social media program, measurement is carved out as a separate section of focus (see Figure 8.1). Creating the appropriate metrics and tracking changes over a period of time help to prove the value of PR and social media engagement. Metrics are also necessary as business executives decide whether to invest more resources into their employees’ social media participation and shared experiences with their stakeholders.
Figure 8.1. The Social Media Strategy Wheel: PR Practice #8
Setting up social media measurement means you must have a full understanding of the metrics available from simple community participation to more complex engagement. These are the metrics that illustrate how a company is reaching higher-level business communications goals, as well the metrics that benchmark the goals for different types of social media participation by department. The Master of the Metrics quickly discovers the C-Level Suite or senior leadership team has their own view and expectations of metrics versus what departments/community managers and other employees involved in your social media programs expect to review from their initiatives.
What Are the Responsibilities of the Master of the Metrics?
As a Master of the Metrics, you have many responsibilities. You must make sure your organization is capturing the metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on the macro level, which is across the entire organization, and you’re also helping to guide metrics on a micro level (by department). You can break your new practice into the following areas:
• Understanding Social Media ROI for Executives
• Discovering a Six-Step Metrics Process for Programs Across the Company
• Determining the Difference Between Inform, Inspire, and Engage Metrics
Understanding Social Media ROI for Executives
There is no one accepted measure or set of metrics to determine the return on public relations investments. When executives evaluate PR, they consider how public relations leads to business growth or how it relates to leads, the sales cycle, crisis management, strategic partnerships, recruiting the best talent, brand visibility, competitors, and stakeholder relationships. Public relations’ use of social media is no different and must offer a quantitative look at the business impact. However, the term Return on Investment (ROI) is thrown around loosely in communications. Too many professionals think of ROI as results of an initiative, but not always as a business outcome that ties to a company’s bottom line and profit.
When you discuss ROI with an executive, especially at the C-Level, ROI means the money portion. It’s the return in dollars, minus the initial investment for the initiative, divided by the initial amount of the investment, multiplied by 100. If there is a positive difference, then that’s the positive percentage of ROI, and it’s a win for the company. To simplify, say you hire a community manager at $40,000/year to create and manage your social media promotions, and your Facebook page generates $50,000 in product sales (from click to conversion) that same year. If no additional costs were involved in the Facebook promotion development, then your ROI is 25 percent. You’ve made a good social media investment.
Shares, comments, impressions, tweets, retweets, views, and increases in “likes,” friends, and followers during a campaign do not directly equal the ROI an executive requires you to deliver. These metrics don’t highlight how the company reaches higher-level business communications goals. Although these are indeed important metrics, they do not directly connect to the company’s bottom line. Of course, it’s a different story, if you take the same tweet, coupled with a promotional link to a landing page on your website, where people can purchase a discounted product for $500.00. When 10,000 people click the link and complete the sale, well then, the initiative definitely contributed to the company’s bottom line.
It’s not that your executives are uninterested in the many types of metrics that can be measured, or all of the incredible resources and platforms to get the job done. It’s just that they have a minimal amount of time and they look at specific values. If you have their attention, say only once a week or once a month for a one-hour meeting, you need to have the right metrics available. Metrics should be presented the way your executives expect them, which means in a report format that’s easy to digest quickly. Most of the growth areas of interest to executives can be measured through social media analytics, but you also need to integrate other forms of measurement for a clearer picture of your company’s communication growth over time (including surveys, opinion polls, one-on-one interviews, brand audits, SEO metrics, website analytics, and so on).
Public relations and social media can deliver ROI. The launch of GM’s FastLane blog is an excellent example of how communication with customers, in a social community, showed a return directly related to a financial bucket. Bob Lutz, former GM vice chairman, spoke at the PRSA International Conference in Detroit 2009. He discussed the initial launch of the FastLane blog and how it was one of the first blogs personally written by senior executives. However, his communications professionals at GM were there to counsel on customer comments, topics, and situations. GM executives used the blog to gain valuable customer feedback. Social media saved the company approximately $180,000.00 a year in research costs, which would have gone toward traditional focus group research. In addition, GM experienced enormous goodwill with customers whose voices were heard directly by executives. When you look at the ROI of the FastLane blog, it’s easy to see how social media tied to a higher-level goal and affected the company’s bottom line.2
Finding the ROI for executives also requires clear objectives, both quantified and measured over time. For example, you can measure awareness by monitoring product conversations, especially as they relate directly to specific product launches or campaigns. Your objective may be to “raise awareness of XYC Co’s new widget campaign by increasing the number of relationships with influential widget bloggers, from 10 last year to more than 25 this year.” Off course, having access to website analytics during the campaign determines if there were a correlation between higher conversation volume and the increase in blogger relationships, and how this impacted traffic to the website (for consumers to access more product information). If you can tie together the elevated levels of conversations, an increase in relationships, and raised traffic patterns (through an overlay graph via your monitoring platform), then executives will definitely take notice.
Remember, measurement is not a set of isolated clicks or brand mentions. You often need to compare the metrics you find in social media and analyze them against other data (web analytics, sales, number of customer service complaints, number of service calls, and so on). For example, if spikes are in the daily volume of conversations or your Share of Voice (SOV), which is the amount of mentions in various platforms, you would also look to see if spikes are in traffic to a specific area of the website (noting the source of the traffic). At this point, you can use website analytics to measure from click to conversion. At the same time, you can compare your SOV against that of your competition to evaluate if conversations, mentions, or coverage is greater or if it pales in comparison.
Executives are also interested in brand reputation and sentiment metrics. For example, you can measure brand sentiment by capturing the positive, negative, and neutral mentions about your company, its products, services, and executives. The information can be captured through social media monitoring software (free or paid software) that enables you to track over a period of time. You can benchmark the increases and decreases of the following: net brand and net industry sentiment; sentiment before, during, and after a PR campaign; and sentiment before, during, and after a crisis situation.3 You also must compare the company’s net brand sentiment to competitors in the market. Are your stakeholders speaking more favorably about competing brands, and if so, why? You can use these metrics to show executives how net brand sentiment changes over time. The information you provide can allow them to gauge the attitude of stakeholders through network conversations, shared experiences, and via online media and blog coverage as well. Social media metrics provide a good indication of brand reputation as experienced through the company’s social media channels.
In all cases, the social media metrics captured during your PR programs should tie back to your goals. However, these metrics can’t be viewed in a vacuum, especially as your programs are in conjunction with other areas of marketing. Remember, public relations and its use of social media is a part of the mix. Your metrics must be looked at simultaneously with marketing, advertising, and the measurement of other digital initiatives. However, you can see the PR professional’s use of social media can lead to bottom-line ROI. Of course, you must ensure you illustrate the difference between what metrics your executives need on a macro level (to show the business growth) versus what’s measured for departmental initiatives, which all should map to program goals.
Discovering a Six-Step Metrics Process for Programs Across the Company
As the Master of the Metrics, you also must figure out how individual departments (including the communications department) use social media metrics to evaluate individual program goals and the strategies employed. All department efforts, of course, should support higher-level company communications goals. But, social media measurement is also a required practice to show the success of the specific department initiative. Being on the Core Social Media Team, you should encourage departments and internal champions to take advantage of the monitoring and measurement practices, so they can gather meaningful metrics and report program success.
Using a six-step process, here’s how you can help your department as well as other departments in your organization to focus on using and evaluating analytics to measure what is or isn’t working in social media programs. Necessary adjustments to campaign/program tactics and reaching departmental goals and objectives may be tweaked along the way. All programs from the macro level down to the micro department level need goals and objectives with supporting strategies and tactics.
Following is how the higher-level goals and supporting metrics may filter down to the department level. If these goals include reputation/image, dialogue and engagement, advocacy/relationship building, sales revenue and leads, and thought leadership and stakeholder education, then use this outline to determine what needs to be captured in terms of metric reporting by each department, per program:
1. Review sentiment metrics on a weekly basis (or as needed depending on the program or situation). You should focus on any negative sentiment first by correcting any miscommunication or helping community members. Sentiment metrics also enable you to find opportunities to use positive sentiment as a means to create endorsements or relationships with new influencers/brand ambassadors.
2. Review peaks and valleys of daily volume (mentions) during your programs to see which conversations and topics peak at certain times. You can use the same types of communication methods or share similar content in your next program based on what worked with your audience (and their audience) in a social community. You should also learn from the metrics how to close the gap between the peaks and valleys by injecting proven communications and content during the “valley” phases of your next campaign.
3. Review audience activity in your programs, as participation relates to the content you share. You can set up bit.ly or Ow.ly links or use Google URL builder to track link activity, and whether audiences click through to review and share your content, or if they participate further by registering, purchasing, or asking for more information. Links are often created for specific programs, and even particular channels, and they enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of your content in reaching program goals.
4. Analyze SOV metrics during your programs. This includes identifying the networks with the most activity and determining if the activity is based on the type or format of the content shared, the nature of the topics, influencers who work with you at the time, and the timing of other newsworthy events that took place. Understanding the SOV metrics enables you to plan similar programs based on what has worked in a particular network. If your metrics reveals successful strategies in one network, you can tweak the strategy to meet the needs of a different community underperforming to spark more engagement. Compare your metrics against the SOV of your competitors in the same network.
5. Review relationships with top influencers and customer advocates by reaching out and thanking them, rewarding them, and asking them to participate in other interesting programs that would also interest their communities. You can also involve your influencers in brainstorming sessions to see other ways you can work together. You must keep an eye on your influencer participation metrics versus the increase of overall community member participation.
6. Thought leadership, for each of your social media accounts, is an important metric to capture. In some cases, you can monitor increases in Klout, check Traackr rankings and PeerIndex scores, and then tie these metrics to program activity. You can evaluate the number of influencer mentions and positive messaging about specific programs, products, or areas of the company. You also need to use tools, such as Twitter Grader and Facebook Grader, to capture metrics that evaluate department profile scores based on your community participation each month.
Of course, there is no shortage of metrics to capture. The six steps are to guide your efforts. However, as you explore social media and what’s available through technology to spark stakeholder passion and participation, you can add to the steps to reveal additional ways to show social media program success in your department(s).
Determining the Difference Between Inform, Inspire, and Engage Metrics
When a company makes the decision to participate in social media, there are three phases of participation. At each phase, metrics can be captured with varying levels of importance. These phases follow.
Phase I: Inform
The Inform phase is the level of participation that focuses on your own social media actions rather than those of your peers. For example, it includes the number of times you post on Facebook or Google+, how many times you tweet a day/week/month, the number of videos you upload to YouTube, or the photos you post on Flickr. The inform stage is clearly informational and centers on your company’s news, information, and timely updates. (You’ve listened and now you’re sharing helpful resources.) But there is little or no interaction with your stakeholders. At this point, your metrics are focused on what you do and not how or what others do with the information you share. These metrics are quantified and can be evaluated over time. You can view the increases and decreases in your outputs by department or your overall company’s sharing habits. Based upon past experience, executives are less interested in these metrics. Although, they are valuable to track because they show overall social media participation and the frequency at which you share your news and information versus the company resources expended for social media communications.
Phase II: Inspire
Moving up a level to the Inspire phase means you now motivate your constituents to use the information you provide and to further share their experience. In other words, you inspire them to either pass along your stories to their own networks or to create new content based on what you offer. The Inspire stage is much more interactive with dialogue, and it’s during this phase the seeds of the relationship building process are firmly planted. Examples of metrics you capture throughout the Inspire phase include:
• Number of comments you receive
• Increase in community growth
• Number of views or impressions on your page
• Number of tweets or retweet by influencers and customer advocates
• Number of articles, blog posts, videos, and so on generated by consumer advocates, influencers, and the media
• Brand sentiment about the information you share
• Awareness and reach based on number or spikes in conversations
The Inspire phase is a critical step toward true engagement and building a stronger relationship; the point beyond awareness and interest that moves your audience toward loyalty and advocacy.
Phase III: Engagement
The Engagement phase is the highest level of interaction with people in your communities. When you truly engage with your stakeholders, you are deep in conversation that leads to valuable business outcomes including leads, sales, customer-service satisfaction, cost-savings, and strategic relationships. These are financially-based metrics as well as the higher-level qualitative information, which includes education and learning, greater awareness through editorial coverage, reciprocal behavior, sentiment as it relates to reputation, customer service success stories, and product and service research/intelligence. At this stage, engagement is often a co-created experience. You ask your community members to help you solve a problem, tell you what kind of communication they want to receive via social media, and work with you to create a better overall brand experience. Crowdsourcing is your highest level of interaction, and the knowledge you gain can help you to be more efficient and meaningful with your communication moving forward.
“As you evaluate your metrics, pause frequently and ask, ‘so what?’” explains digital communications leader Valerie Merahn Simon who is also the co-founder of #HAPPO, a Twitter-based initiative to facilitate new networking opportunities for job seekers and employers in the public relations industry. In an interview with Valerie, she discussed how the goal of a social media effort is not to be successful at social media, but to play a role in driving the success of your business:
Looking at growth in the size and engagement of your social communities over time is not enough. Whether you have a Facebook community of 10 or 10,000, so what? To understand and improve the real impact your efforts are having on your organization, you must identify metrics that place a focus on business outcomes, such as sales or donations, event attendance, customer service and support, product development, and recruitment and retention.
Be mindful that analyzing the official social media channels of your organization is not enough. Employee networks post a formidable power. As of November 3, 2011, LinkedIn claimed more than 135 million members. Facebook boasts of more than 800 million active users, and Twitter cites more than 235 million users. An abstract understanding of how your employees are using social media is one thing; identifying tangible ways to leverage these powerful networks is another.
According to the October 2011 Booz & Company/Buddy Media Survey 65% of organizations now have social media policies and another 29% are currently in the process of developing or planning a policy. With these policies in place, and employees well connected throughout their respective industry, companies are poised to better harness their employees networks to strengthen the organization.
As the economy begins to turn, one tangible way that businesses can capitalize on these networks is to fill the inevitable hiring needs by integrating a social component to employee referral programs. A coordinated effort between HR and public relations to offer continued social media training and guidelines is essential. Those responsible for social media within the organization must guide the efforts, making sure that messaging and responses are consistent with the brand and with the brand’s behavior in different online communities. Effective social media metrics for recruitment must not be limited to simply the number of friends or followers on a career specific Facebook page or Twitter account or even the number of conversions from blog/Twitter/Facebook campaigns to candidates to hire. Metrics should assess the speed or length of the recruiting cycle, the quality of the hire, changes in costs of traditional recruiting events and paid advertisements, and over time retention rates.
Integrating social media into business processes is an investment, but by implementing measurable goals aligned with business performance, measurement is not limited to historical statistics, but a valuable roadmap indicating the benefits, opportunities, and challenges social media poses to your organization.
As the Master of the Metrics, you must guide your organization from the Inform phase through to the Inspire phase and then all the way to the highest level, Engage. Notice there will be social media properties that maintain an Inform or Inspire presence, if this is the goal of the interaction. For example, there are companies that use the company’s Facebook page or their Twitter feed to provide the latest in news, product updates, and special promotions, along with some sharing that leads to greater stakeholder interaction. However, these same companies offer separate social properties for customers and other stakeholders to interact directly and more dynamically with employees of the company, the types of interactions that lead to customer loyalty, and advocacy.
What Are the Best Practices of the Master of the Metrics?
Shonali Burke is an award-winning communications consultant, speaker, and the founder of Shonali Burke Consulting. She shared her thoughts on how PR Professionals can become Masters of the Metrics.
Q: What are the biggest mistakes PR professionals make in their PR and social media measurement?
A: There are three fairly common mistakes. The first is that PR professionals don’t set measurable objectives. They have ephemeral targets, such as “buzz,” even if they usually set overall goals. However, not setting quantifiable, time-bound objectives is actually counter-productive to your measurement program. Professionals need measurement built into their programs, and these must be specific measures. Otherwise, it’s tough to create a strategy that helps you work toward reaching these objectives. That’s why I say measurement and strategy go hand in hand.
The second common mistake is focusing predominantly on output measures, such as followers, fans, impressions, or how many people are in your Google+ circles. Unless you have 50,000 followers who all take action, that’s not impressive. Only about 1% may take some type of action, based on your communication. Therefore, those numbers can be misleading, if you are solely using them as your metrics—I call them “vanity” numbers. Of course, having large numbers is not a bad thing because with higher numbers, the greater the chances of your message being disseminated and amplified, in and through your communities. What it comes down to, though, is engaging people through your communications, which is what makes public relations so exciting in this day and age.
A common third measurement mistake is PR professionals set up objectives, but then they don’t track them consistently over a period of time to analyze the intelligence properly. Timeframes must be consistent, so when it comes time to review the data, you’re not looking at Twitter followers from month to month and some other metric being measured from week to week. Many professionals overlook the value of Microsoft Excel, Google Analytics, and the latter’s URL Builder tool. These are three tools that give you a way to look at your online data and what’s working; and Excel can be particularly valuable in letting you create a simple measurement model, where you can plug your numbers in and see what’s working (or what’s not). And if you’re tracking everything over the same timeframe, then it’s easier for you to make the correlations that will be helpful in your analysis.
Q: How do you show C-Level executives the ROI of social media?
A: The term ROI is thrown around so much that it almost makes you not want to use it. But if you do, you must realize that it’s an established financial calculation. A great deal of the measurement we talk about in social media relates to impact. An excellent example of impact and metrics to show campaign progress is the USA for UNHCR Blue Key Campaign, which helps more than 43 million refugees worldwide. As a nonprofit program, there was no funding for outtakes, such as surveys, so we focused our efforts on outputs and outcomes. The metrics were set up and tracked consistently. As a result, we saw how outputs allowed us to reach our campaign objectives. We needed to reach 6,000 keys in December 2011. Our metrics showed how the number of key purchases grew, especially as the Blue Key Champions (the bloggers who volunteered their time to help raise awareness about the refugee crisis), as well as other consumer advocates began writing about the campaign.
For example, the Blue Key Campaign used Twitter “Tweetathons” to increase the number of key purchases as well as awareness of the campaign. Receiving notifications in real time, we witnessed the direct correlation between the number of key purchases and our Tweetathon activities, which usually spanned a 12-hour day. Making those correlations are important to executives, and how you track your work reveals the impact and value of your efforts.
In a sense, the Blue Key Campaign was a lab for me to experiment with metrics, and it was interesting. The one thing that really stood out was the search results for Blue Key before the campaign. At the beginning, a search for “blue key” would bring up a link to the campaign site or USA for UNHCR’s site, but it would be deep in the search pages. You had to sift through pages of links to get there. However, as we included the Blue Key Champions in the campaign, and as they wrote blog posts and linked back to the Blue Key site, the site started moving up in Google SERPs as well. Now, the website shows up on the first page of the search engines. This is important because by nature, people who search will not go through several pages to find a link. They don’t click Next and then Next again. They will look at the first page and leave if they don’t find a link to their planned destination.
We showed how search rankings were up, how people were talking much more about the campaign via hashtag conversations on Twitter and our Tweetathons, and how email leads were increasing as well. By tracking the analytics, we could see how these metrics affected the overall campaign. The information mentioned here is useful to organizations, especially if they’re gathering email addresses for marketing, which minimizes the cost of acquisition. It’s this type of impact that helps the executives to understand the value of the program.
Q: Do you think PR professionals need to include additional data to show how social media leads to valuable business outcomes? For example, should PR pros have access to website analytics and sales data during their PR campaigns?
A: Yes, absolutely. And using tracking URLs is a key part of that. As I said earlier, Google Analytics URL builder is not used to its fullest capacity. If you’re using tracking URLs, such as Bit.ly or Ow.ly, they track only on their own platform. For example, if you have a specific link tied to a landing page for your program, and someone wants to reshorten the link, you won’t be able to access all of the data you need if they use a different URL shortener. But if you use Google’s URL builder, which contains your tracking code, then it doesn’t matter if someone shortens or reshortens the link using their favorite URL shortener; you can still see traffic patterns via specific platforms in your Analytics.
We noticed during the Blue Key Campaign how the traffic patterns changed after the first phase, and we wouldn’t have known this had we not set up tracking URLs for the campaign. It’s always fascinating to see what’s working. Google URL builder was a critical part of the program. We created tracking URLs for three specific landing pages per channel (for example, Twitter, Facebook, and so on) and shared them with our Blue Key Champions. For example, for Twitter, we had three specific URLs for Twitter Tweetathon participants to either purchase a key, go to the About page, or access the home page of the Blue Key site. We would periodically remind our Champions to use these specific URLs to keep track of campaign traffic and the engagement.
This allowed us to see which platforms were sending the incoming traffic. It’s interesting to note because PR professionals have not included URLs in a lot of their media relations work. Tracking links is also a perfect opportunity to see how journalists are taking advantage of the information you send or the story you want them to cover. If you’re working with a key group of journalists, let’s say 30 of them for a particular program, you might want to use a specific URL in your pitch. Then, you can see who’s clicking through, and to where. This helps you identify what information is being used the most. If you have good relationships with the reporters, you can even ask them to embed the links in their stories. Doing this could help you not just see which stories are having the most impact, but might even help you improve your pitch. (If they’re not clicking through your pitches, for example, is it because the pitch is poorly-written? If you’re pitching the wrong group of people, then you have another problem altogether!)
PR people should have access to different analytics depending on the program. You may need to review sales data, downloads to a white paper, registrations to a newsletter, or website analytics. It’s important to experiment, and if you can’t set up analytics for your company, then you should try to set up metrics for yourself, such as on your blog. Experiment and play!
Q: What advice would you give to PR professionals who have to show more accountability for social media in their PR programs?
A: When you’re asked to be in charge of a program, it’s flattering, but it’s also a huge responsibility—and that’s where accountability comes in. We are the voice of the business. When working in social media, public relations professionals have to be careful. We have to inject personality and humanity into our outreach and communications, giving a social face and voice to the business. At the same time, we have to think about how we are building and energizing communities to reach our objectives. It takes a lot of energy and time spent online.
With respect to measurement, you have to make sure people in the organization and the executives know what you’re trying to achieve and the value social media brings to the organization. Executives want to reach their business goals, and if you can show them how it’s done through social media, then they will want to help you. Internal education is a key component to any program. As social media has become more popular, it doesn’t necessarily live in the PR department. However, there has to be an understanding of what social [media] is trying to do and how working together leads to greater impact. Most organizations need education, and PR professionals can do this in the form of case studies, test campaigns, and examples of how social media has helped companies to reach campaign objectives.
Master of the Metrics Check List
Set up social media measurement with a full understanding of the metrics available from simple community participation to more complex engagement.
Make sure your organization captures the metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on the macro level, which is across the entire organization, and you’re also helping to guide metrics on a more micro level (by department).
Discuss ROI with an executive, especially at the C-Level, ROI as the money portion or the value social media brings to the organization in terms of leads, sales, recruitment, cost-savings, customer service satisfaction, crisis mitigation, reputation management, market share, competition, and so on.
Integrate other forms of measurement for a clearer picture of your company’s communication growth over time; don’t measure in a vacuum.
Present social media metrics the way your executives expect them, which means in a report format that’s easy for them to digest quickly.
Track metrics for executives and develop a spreadsheet to show analytics over time, including reputation/brand sentiment, awareness or aggregated daily volume as compared to competitors, and SOV in different networks versus a competitor’s SOV.
Observe your department’s metrics simultaneously with marketing, advertising, and the measurement of other digital initiatives.
Use the six-step process presented in the chapter to help your department, as well as other departments in your organization, to focus on using and evaluating analytics to measure what is or isn’t working in social media programs.
Identify the three phases of participation in your organization (inform, inspire, and engage) and determine the metrics that can be captured, with varying levels of importance.
Evaluate your social media metrics by categorizing them into lower-level community participation versus higher-level adoptions that lead to business growth; you can do this for different social media profiles.