CHAPTER 6
ROI AND MEASUREMENT

One of the quickest ways to initiate an animated discussion in America these days is to bring up politics. Even in the politest of company, the rules of civility can go out the door whenever the subject rears its head. People who had been laughing together in camaraderie only minutes before can become quickly entrenched in heated debate. In social media circles, you might well achieve the same effect by bringing up the subject of measurement and return on investment.

One school of thought within the social media world is that the ROI of an active social media program is self-evident. Companies have paid big money for years for focus groups to tell them what customers think about their brand, products, or marketing campaigns. Now that the social Web makes it possible for us to get the same information for free by simply taking part in online conversations with customers and potential customers, the ROI is pretty clear. Talking to customers, this argument goes, should not be something considered of questionable value. People want to buy from people they know, like, and trust—and the tools of social media help an organization develop these relationships more effectively and humanly than ever before.

Scott Stratten, author of UnMarketing, is fond of joking, “Every time someone asks about the ROI of social media, a kitten dies. And a unicorn.”¹ The dismissive nature of the statement is Scott’s way of reinforcing the argument that not all investment is financial, that not all return should be measured in terms of revenue, and that business today (from the consumer’s perspective, anyway) is based on a brand’s willingness to spend time building those relationships and earning that trust.

Of course, anyone who’s been in a business environment knows that there will always be an expectation of demonstrable return on any investment. There’s another school of thought that argues that it doesn’t make any sense for a big organization to engage in an activity that doesn’t deliver a demonstrable return and payoff—be it in revenue or sales for a corporation or donations or volunteerism for a nonprofit. Why would any organization for which revenue generation is the raison d’être continue an activity that does not contribute to that goal? What good do thousands of unique visitors to your blog, tens of thousands of Twitter followers, and hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans do you if they’re not generating revenue?

Resources in any organization are limited, and they need to be applied to activities that reliably return the investment in them. Olivier Blanchard, author of Social Media ROI, argues that nonfinancial impact—while valuable—is not ROI and that unless social media programs are tied to actual business performance, they’re not viable in the long term within a business environment.² (As an aside, I greatly respect Olivier’s work and suggest that you might want to check his book out too.)

As with most debates, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. I’ll confess, I fall closer to the side of those who argue that social media should be tied to business performance and goals and should be measured accordingly. There is room for the nonfinancial elements—to a point. But ultimately they still need to be means to an end. Think of it this way: in a traditional sales environment, sales don’t happen in one meeting. They are a series of relationships and earned trust—the salesperson walks into the client’s office and makes a presentation, then perhaps takes the client to dinner. They go back to the office in another week or so and present to a few more people, including the client’s boss. Then they might go golfing or out to a ball game. Then there’s another presentation and another dinner … eventually, the sale is made—although often the client is buying the salesperson as much as the product, so great is the trust and so strong is the relationship established. Rarely does a good sales manager look at her sales team and ask, “What was the ROI on that golf game? On the dinner you are expensing?” She knows, as all successful salespeople know, that selling is a process and that the building of relationships is an essential part of that process.

But note that in that analogy the process ended in a sale. The ROI of individual relationship-building activities isn’t in question as long as the sale is eventually reached. Remove that end achievement, and we have a whole other story. A salesperson who is constantly taking potential clients out to dinner or golfing or to ball games but who never closes a deal is going to have some serious questions to answer about what he’s spending on and why—and without a sale or two in short order, he’d probably be looking for a new job. All the nonfinancial-impact stuff (as Olivier calls it) in the world is only valuable if it results in the desired end goal. If you can show that and increase in sales, revenue, or the meeting of business goals results in that end from the strategy, the individual tactics are called less into question.

Now, not all business goals are specifically financial. Not everyone in the business will always understand this, especially those without marketing or PR backgrounds. As Geoff Livingston, cofounder of Zoetica consulting and a prominent social media influencer in his own right, reminds us, “Many executives do not understand the difference between a desired outcome and literal ROI.”³ But that difference can be crucial to judging a social media campaign’s success or that of the overall social media program. If leadership is expecting a program that will demonstrably result in revenue generation, you’d better develop one designed to do that which includes measurement tools and strategies designed to track to those goals. If nonfinancial impact is an accepted goal of a campaign or program (i.e., product awareness, brand reputation, “buzz,” online mentions, etc.), design your program to achieve those goals and have a measurement system ready to back it up once it’s completed.

ROI questions, of course, are not unique to social media. Proving the value of something not designed to be directly tied to sales or revenue generation can be challenging in traditional PR and marketing efforts as well. What is the worth of a fantastic story in the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, or of a glowing review (in GM’s case) in Motor Trend? How do you prove the value of a PR hit or campaign? How do you prove that a marketing campaign is responsible for a purchase by a customer?

While these questions still do exist within the social Web, the technologies of the Internet do offer perhaps a better opportunity than ever to directly answer them. Through the use of short links, for example, it’s possible to know not only where a click to your site is coming from but also, in many cases, where the short link was accessed. You can get a sense of which outlets or individuals are driving traffic for you.

Four Questions

Before beginning a social media program and trying to measure its success, there are four fundamental questions to ask:

1. What data will we be collecting? (Which metrics do we believe are the most important?)

2. How will we be collecting it? (Which tools do we believe or find to be most effective in acquiring the data we’ve chosen?)

3. What kind of analysis will we apply to it? (Will we report just raw numbers? What kind of insights are we hoping to get from the data once it’s collected, and how will we derive them from this data?)

4. How will we report it? (Through what mechanisms will we distribute what we learn to the rest of the organization?)

Once the answers to these four questions are understood, measurement becomes much less mystical, and ROI seems far less abstract.

I’m going to spend this chapter focusing on the answers to question 1 regarding the metrics that truly matter in social media and what information you should be collecting. Answering question 2 would involve my endorsing specific tools or platforms—and while I am a fan of some in particular, it’s for each organization to decide among Radian6, Converseon, Looking Glass, Google Analytics, CoTweet, Collective Intellect, Attensity360, Cymfony, BuzzLogic, Visible Technologies, or any of the myriad other tools available to big brands. Each has its strengths and its shortcomings; I’ve used several different listening and metrics platforms and will use more of them in the future. I can’t tell anyone which brand to use any more than I could use this book to tell you which make of car to drive, which airline to fly, or what brand of toothpaste to use. But once an organization has identified the metrics and data it finds most important, suffice it to say that there are now more than a dozen strong options, companies that specialize in collecting that data and reporting it back to the client. Monitoring and assessing the social Web isn’t as overwhelming a proposition anymore as it used to be.

Question 3 is simply a question of intellectual capital. Whether the brand’s team or agency partners are analyzing the information that comes in, someone has to be making sense of the numbers and what they mean. If an organization has decided that “number of mentions” on Twitter is a key metric for it, someone has to take the report of how often the brand is mentioned on Twitter and apply insight to it: What was the effect of being mentioned 1,789 times on Twitter yesterday? Did it drive traffic to our website? Did sales via our site increase after the Twitter campaign because? If the brand is a retail outlet, did foot traffic in stores increase after the campaign began? Someone has to tie all the numbers together and determine what they mean. And the answer to the fourth question, reporting, is going to be different for each organization. Will findings be reported via e-mail? Via a password-protected website behind the company firewall? Through PowerPoint presentations at meetings attended by only relevant parties? And who will have access to these reports—only the department that commissioned the measurement? Executives within marketing and communications or customer service? Business leadership? Thought must be given in advance to the questions of how the analysis of collected data will be distributed, and to whom.

We’re going to spend the rest of this chapter talking about which metrics truly matter in social media and which reflect true success. But before you start thinking about how you’re going to measure your program and which metrics you’ll use, there’s a more important foundational issue you need to address. It stands as the first step in determining the ROI of your social media program.

Identify What Success Will Look Like Before Identifying Tactics or Platforms

One of the biggest mistakes an organization can make is establishing a social media presence that’s there for the sake of being there, without rhyme or reason. “Because everyone has a page” is not a good answer to the question “Why do you want to be on Facebook?” You have to know what you’re looking to do and what senior leadership wants to see as a result.

If an organization begins with the platform—e.g., “We need a Twitter account,” or “Let’s get a Facebook page”—without knowing what it wants from the tool, the result is usually a cluttered, purposeless, and undirected social program. Many will experience a disjointed “mission creep” as social presences are built around sub-brands, product lines, or even marketing campaigns. Would you consider buying TV time without having a product and a desired outcome in mind? Of course not—all media buys have a great deal of thought behind them. You should consider similar levels of planning for social media.

Clearly identify what success will look like and what leadership’s expectations are for the program. Are you looking to draw people to your blog, Facebook page, YouTube channel, or Twitter feed? Are you looking to just spread your content across as many channels as possible and get the message out as broadly as you can? Are you looking to directly impact sales? The answer matters.

• If you’re ready to claim success because 151 blogs have posted your video on their sites, but management was looking for new subscribers to your YouTube channel and there are only 14 of those, you have a disconnect about what constitutes success.

• If you’re aiming to generate 50,000 new fans for your Face-book page but only attract 9,000—but at the same time generate 10,000 mentions on Twitter in less than a week, is that an unexpected success, or does it represent an unacceptable failure?

• Does “buzz” equal success? Do numbers? Do sales?

• Whatever the answer, do you have mechanisms in place to measure whether you’re hitting that target? Are you monitoring online conversations to even know how much “buzz” you’re generating?

• Do you have anything in place to track whether visits to some of your specific Web pages are increasing during the campaign or to know which links they’re coming from?

• If you’re expecting sales results, do you have anything in place that will demonstrably show that sales are increasing due to the people reached in this social campaign?

Unless you have an idea going in of what you’re looking to do and what success would look like—qualitatively and quantitatively—you’re never going to know whether you’ve really achieved a return on your investment.

Know Your Zero Point

To know whether you’re having an effect, you have to know where you’re starting. How will you be able to tell whether your social media efforts are having a demonstrable ROI if you haven’t identified a baseline?

If your goal is “buzz,” then you should begin any effort by doing a sweep to identify how often your brand is mentioned in social networks before one of your campaigns begins. That way you’ll be able to demonstrate more effectively that mentions or buzz increased as a result of your efforts. There are multiple tools you can use—from Google Analytics to SEOmoz to Radian6 to Converseon—to monitor various social networks and platforms in order to identify the frequency and sentiment of mentions of your brand and establish a baseline of the ratio of positive, neutral, and negative sentiment toward your brand to compare with the sentiments after your campaign has run. Whatever tool you use, it should help you measure not just volume or reach: “How often are we mentioned?” “How many followers/fans do we have?” It should also look at things like authority (how often your content is being shared by others into their networks, signifying that you’re seen as a trustworthy source of information), responsiveness (how often your community is choosing to engage or interact back with you and what percentage of your reach is active with you, indicating that people are actually absorbing the information you’ve put out rather than either ignoring it or passively observing it), and influence (what percentage of your content is shared or distributed by others as opposed to sitting on your sites or pages alone). After all, a big part of what you’re aiming for is for your content to be shared through social networks, so shouldn’t you know how often your stuff is being shared? Being on YouTube or Facebook isn’t “winning” at social media; you’ll never achieve millions of views of a video by trying to attract all those people to your site or channel. If you want the big view counts, you’re going to need people to share and distribute that video for you. So shouldn’t you have a sense of whether you’re creating the kind of content people want to share by checking to see how often your audience is influenced to share what you’re putting out there?

But no matter which measures you’re looking at, you still need to know your starting point if you want to really understand the impact of what you’re doing. If you’re defining success as driving visits to your website or Facebook page, shouldn’t you know how many visitors you get in an average day or week before your campaign begins? Can you track where any additional visitors are coming from, via short links or IP analysis? Can you prove that it’s your campaign or initiative driving that traffic? If you can, you’re going to find it much easier to stand in front of the bosses and report on your program’s success and justify whatever budget and resources you’ve spent. If you’re going to define success by actual sales or increases in revenue, you need to establish the baseline of where sales are at the start of the campaign or initiative so that you can determine whether there’s a tangible impact.

The bottom line is, quite possibly the most important element in measuring the effectiveness of your social media efforts is knowing your starting point, making prework and preparation vital to your ability to demonstrate results. This is another reason not to just jump into Facebook or Twitter figuring that you’ll learn as you go and experiment along the way. Experimenting and taking risks is good and necessary in social media, but there has to be purpose to your efforts, and you have to know what you’re trying to achieve in order to know what success looks like.

Once you’ve decided what you’re hoping to accomplish with your social program and determined your baseline against which you’ll measure success and actual return on your investment, the next steps are incorporating the metrics and measurements you’ll use in assessing and reporting that success.

Lies, Klout Scores, and Statistics

With the explosive growth of social media and networks in the past few years has come, at least superficially, a more tangible measure of someone’s influence and import: numbers. Whether they’re Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Klout scores, or Technorati rankings, these numbers may seem in the digital environment to be what a thick Rolodex was in the eras of “Mad Men” or Wall Street: measures of someone’s connectedness and value as an entry point to any number of spheres of influence or communities. And unlike Rolodexes, it seems that you can see those connections before you hire or retain someone, just by checking the person’s fan/follower counts or Klout scores.

Conscious of the seeming value of these numbers, over the past few years, a mind-set has developed around the importance of increasing yours. Services like Klout purport to measure an individual’s connections, networks, and activity within them across multiple social platforms—and even reward the individuals with higher scores. It’s common at social media conferences to hear an audience member asking a speaker how to increase follower or fan counts quickly—often because the questioner has been given precisely that direction or assignment by someone in marketing or communications at his organization.

Numbers are universal, and because they’re so prevalent in business, they provide a level of comfort and familiarity that can make the “new” digital environment feel less scary to traditional marketers or communications people who are used to numbers being objective—and measuring their own effectiveness through numbers. It’s easy to be lulled into an overemphasis on them. But this obsession isn’t healthy or wise; numbers are like the golden calf of social media—the false god that serves as an easy, lazy interpretation of the benefits or effectiveness of social media engagement. In lieu of the harder work of deeper and more accurate measurement, all too often companies play a pure numbers game: quick but misleading interpretations of the benefit or claims of success that don’t always stand up to scrutiny. For example, Twitter follower counts can be misleading because, according to an Experian Hitwise survey cited by Fortune in a cover story about Twitter in spring 2011, up to 47 percent of those with Twitter accounts are no longer active on the platform.⁴ So if someone you’re targeting for outreach has 10,000 listed followers, how do you know how many of those are still actively engaging the service and reading your target’s tweets? Is it all 10,000? Closer to 5,300? Somewhere in between?

Whether you’re deciding if your own efforts can be considered successful or trying to determine whom to approach externally for a program or initiative, don’t get caught up in looking purely at numbers in the social Web. It’s a little like getting excited about the Home Run Derby contest during the Major League Baseball All-Star Game festivities: those massive power shots off of batting practice pitches look impressive, and they thrill and wow the crowd, but they’re kind of for show; hits don’t really count until there’s an actual game going on. The fact that someone can hit a monster shot during practice is great, but how will he do during a real game?

For generations, marketing and PR practitioners were evaluated in numbers—specifically, eyeballs and impressions. How many people saw this article? What is that publication’s circulation? How many people saw that commercial? What are the ratings? Beyond the number of readers or viewers, PR practitioners were also measured in terms of number of stories placed: the thicker the clip report, the happier your bosses were.

Even when the social Web emerged, we still employed numbers as a primary arbiter or measurement of the value of our interactions. How many unique monthly visitors does a particular blog have? What is its Technorati ranking? Where does its author fall on the Ad Age Power 150? Give me its Quantcast and Compete and SEOmoz scores! We try to quantify the success of organizational websites through numbers as well: how many page views did that feature get on the corporate website? How much time are visitors spending on the site? How many comments does a particular post on our company blog get?

When other social channels sprouted, marketers’ collective use of numbers reached obsessive heights. With the explosion of YouTube, companies became so consumed with the idea of numbers of views that they began churning out what they foolishly christened “viral” videos—content designed from its conception with the specific, primary goal of generating millions of views.

There are two problems with this approach. First, worrying about the number of views a video is going to get before it’s even created is a distraction from crafting your story effectively. But more important, designating a video “viral” from the outset displays a ridiculously arrogant belief that we in corporate marketing can dictate to the online audience what it will find worthy of sharing. Corporate marketing departments and digital PR agencies do not decide what goes “viral”; audiences do. If an agency or consultant pitches you on “creating a viral video,” politely but firmly show him the door and go find yourself someone who will focus on the story you want to tell rather than looking at the desired result first and promising the unpromisable.

When Twitter emerged, the cycle began all over again. Both marketers and individuals began a blind chase for followers, believing that number of followers was the best measure of influence within the new network. Brands got another number to use in determining whether to interact with a particular person: “How many Twitter followers does he or she have?” In many companies, it’s somewhat common, when encountering a negative tweet or critical customer, to hear company representatives ask the “followers” question before they even ask the nature of the criticism or complaint—as if the criticism is less valid or the complaint less troubling if the person issuing it has only a few followers!

But it’s not just brands who’ve fallen victim to the mind-set that numbers equals influence in Twitter. Within the social media world, we grant the greatest stature and respect to whoever is able to accumulate the most followers. The Twitter community got all caught up in the race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to get to one million followers first.⁵ At some social media conferences, a high number of Twitter followers is enough to get you invited to speak, whether or not you’ve actually achieved anything or you provide anything of value to those followers. Many judge brands’ forays into Twitter more by the number of followers the brand has than by the quality of what the brand shares and the nature of the dialogue it has with followers. This emphasis on followers and the mad scramble to acquire them was partly to blame for the birth of the ubiquitous “get more followers” spam (both tweets and sites)—which reached proportions previously attained only by spam for male enhancement, which is perhaps fitting. As HARO founder and social media influencer Peter Shankman famously cracked, “Twitter followers is the new penis envy.”⁶

There are two great examples from the entertainment world as to why pure numbers do not always equate to “influence.” Social networking indexing site Klout ranks individuals on social networks for their influence based on number of Twitter followers, “likes” on Facebook, connections on LinkedIn, people mentioning them in Facebook status updates, Google mentions, and several other factors. In January 2011, a flurry of media disbelief and incredulity resulted from the revelation that in Klout’s rankings, teen idol Justin Bieber was more influential than the Dalai Lama or President Obama.⁷ While Klout was quick to acknowledge that its algorithms weren’t perfect and could be improved, this demonstrates the danger of looking at numbers as a pure indicator of influence. (I hasten to add that while I find Klout flawed, it is one of the first serious attempts to scientifically measure online influence and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand just yet. It’s trying to do something important; it just hasn’t perfected it.)

The second example came in early March 2011. Actor Charlie Sheen famously went through a bizarre public meltdown that involved drug incidents, stays in rehab, and a series of almost surreal media interviews in which he blasted the producers of his television show and made grandiose, almost messianic statements about himself. On Tuesday, March 1, he started his Twitter account, @charliesheen. In just over 25 hours, Sheen reached one million followers, setting a Guinness World Record.⁸ While some of those followers undeniably were there just to observe the train wreck in progress, the sheer number of Sheen’s followers dwarfed longtime social media influencers like Chris Brogan and Jason Falls as well as major brands well established on Twitter, like Disney and Best Buy. In less than a week, Sheen even achieved two million followers—25 percent more followers than Starbucks!⁹

No one would legitimately argue that Charlie Sheen—especially mid-meltdown—is more influential than Chris Brogan or Jason Falls or that he can affect more people’s behavior online than a Disney, Best Buy, or Starbucks. Yet an assessment of simply follower numbers would seem to indicate that with more than two million followers, Sheen is orders of magnitude more influential than those other individuals or companies or has more influence on people’s behavior or what they do online. If a company had commissioned a list for outreach based on those numbers, we can see how flawed the result might be. No one in her right mind would argue that Justin Bieber is more influential on real-world behavior than President Obama—and that’s the rub: you’re not just trying to drive online behavior, are you? Ultimately, you want to affect real-world behavior too.

Five-hundred-foot towering home runs in the Home Run Derby look great, but the hitter who’s crushing them is only valuable to his team if he can do it during a real game of a pitcher throwing real heat, along with being able to advance a runner, hit to the opposite field when necessary, not strike out 170 times, and play defense as well. Piling up statistics in a meaningless exhibition doesn’t help your team win. In social media, the numbers do matter, but in and of themselves, they do not constitute ROI. “Impressions” are nice and might constitute a measure of the effectiveness of a social media campaign, but unless there’s a more specific tie-back to business objectives, social media is going to still be looked at with a skeptical eye by the bean counters—and quite a few others in the organization.

In the real world, the companies considered most successful at social—and that have the most support at an organizational level for their programs—are the ones looking at social media as a means to an end, not an end in itself. They use social media as one tactic in an arsenal designed to hit real business objectives.

At H&R Block, Zena Weist says, “In order to be a big kid at the ROI and metrics table, you have to talk the company metrics talk.”¹⁰ Some of the “big kid” metrics Zena shared with me that H&R Block uses to measure its social media initiatives: acquisition online (appointments made and digital software units sold); cost avoidance (call deflection and first-contact resolution); and client resolution metrics (resolved issues, customer service surveys, and “saves”).

Nowhere in this list do you see “acquire X number of followers on Twitter,” “attract X thousand fans to our Facebook page,” or even “engage in X number of conversations within social networks each week.” Social media helps H&R Block achieve real business objectives, rather than being an objective all by itself. If we had time or space to list the goals and objectives of the social programs at other companies successful in social media—Dell, Southwest Airlines, IBM, Coca-Cola, and many others—we’d see that this pattern is replicated. A key characteristic of successful social programs is to actually tie them to business goals and measure for results against those goals.

• Is traffic to your own sites or pages up as a result of your activity on social networks? (Are all those followers actually interested in learning more about you due to the conversations or content you have?)

• How often are your followers sharing your content or information with their own networks? Surely 25,000 passive followers don’t do you as much good as 5,000 who actively share your stuff.

• Is whatever the “desired result”—be it website visits, requests for product or service information, appointments set, or even sales or purchases—of your program happening, in at least measurably higher numbers? If not, then how can you argue that your program is working? If so, have you eliminated other factors in order to definitively conclude that social media was the driver of those results?

• How many of your followers or fans are actively interacting with your brand within these networks? Do they ask you questions often? If so, how quickly do you answer them?

• Are customer service response times reduced because of your customer service team’s involvement in social networks? Are customer satisfaction rates increasing? If so, are they higher within social networks or increasing at faster rates than for your traditional customer service?

My point isn’t that you shouldn’t seek out followers or be excited when you reach a milestone number of fans. You just have to have a sense of what you want to do with all those fans once they like your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter or visit your blog. You have to have a reason to have gotten involved in social media in the first place. The numbers aren’t the goal in and of themselves; they merely indicate how big your opportunity is, assuming your plan and program are solid.

If you build a program designed to draw people to your Face-book page as fans, don’t just stop with attracting them. Have a “part two” ready to go and know what you’re going to do with all those fans when they get there and like your page.

• Given that most Facebook users click a “like” button only eight times a month, including liking a friend’s status update or photo, how will you cut through the clutter and attract them in the first place?¹¹ Don’t think that people will like your page just because your brand is loved or has a following; there are tens of thousands of brands on Facebook, almost all of them backed by marketers who are just as sure that their brand is loved and that people will want to follow them. Whether it’s placing ads on Facebook or putting your Facebook URL on some of your other marketing material, you’ll need to do something to break through the noise and grab their attention.

• More important, how will you engage them once they’ve arrived and keep them from leaving or keep them coming back to view your pages regularly? What incentive will they have to stay with you once you’ve gotten their attention? Think of it this way: what if someone invited you to a party, and it sounded as if it was going to be hopping, so you decided to cancel other plans and show up … but when you showed up, nothing was happening, no one was talking, and there wasn’t any music or food or anything to drink, just a bunch of people standing around listening to one person talk. How long would you stay? You’re the host of this party on your Facebook page. Never forget that getting people to show up is the easy part, and the real aim is getting them to not only stay but also participate in your community.

• If you generate more followers on Twitter, what is your strategy to engage them—or, how much leeway have you given your community managers to do so? Are you ready to go past “content calendars” for your Twitter feed and actually pursue conversations and topics you didn’t initiate? When people start following you, will they get anything more out of the experience than a pipeline of information they could have gotten somewhere else? Why would a customer choose to follow your brand on Twitter instead of going to your website or Facebook page, or even just reading the paper or news websites or watching the TV news?

• Do you have anything in place to measure the effectiveness of specific campaigns—a short link to specific Web pages, or a code that your community can use to get a discount on your product, admission to your facility, or access to special, exclusive content? How will you know that those extra Twitter followers are taking any action as a result of your engagement with them?

• If you draw more visitors to your blog, what do you want them to do once they start reading? How will you enable, empower, or entice them to do that? It’s critical to your success to plan from the beginning what will happen once you’ve attracted the attention and fans you hope to attract.

Understanding what you want to achieve or get out of social media is critical to determining whether you’ve received a sufficient return on your investment. A clear definition of success helps you determine what you need to be measuring. And by looking beyond surface numbers to measure true effectiveness against those objectives, you avoid the trap of executing programs designed to win online popularity contests rather than to achieve your business or organizational goals.