New Research on Social Marketing Analytics

I’ve been awaiting this day with eager anticipation for some time now because we are finally releasing our paper on Social Marketing Analytics. Several months ago Eric Peterson and I started talking with Jeremiah and Altimeter Group about the issues facing social marketers. Despite the red hot flames trailing anything with the word social in it, the outlook for effectively measuring the effects of social marketing initiatives in a meaningful way was somewhat grim.

A lack of standardization, reckless experimentation, and unanswered calls for accountability were plaguing businesses who were working in earnest to embark on their social marketing activities. After some intense discussions and some creative thinking, we decided to collaborate on a research project that would leverage social media strategy from Altimeter Group and digital measurement rigor from Analytics Demystified. The result is a framework for measuring social media that we’re happy to share with you today. If you’re into this stuff, please drop us a note or give a call to get involved in the conversation.

Introducing the Social Media Measurement Framework

There’s no denying that social media is the hottest sensation sweeping the globe today. Yet, marketers must see past the shiny object that is social media and start applying a pragmatic approach to measuring their efforts in the social space. We developed a framework that starts with a strategy that requires solid business objectives. From there, specific measures of success – that we call Key Performance Indicators – provide a standardized method for quantifying performance.

Mapping Business Objectives to KPIs

Our report identifies four social business objectives that include: Foster Dialog, Promote Advocacy, Facilitate Support and Spur Innovation. While, there may be others that apply to your business, we view these as a solid foundation for beginning the measurement process. In the report we align KPIs to these social business objectives and offer real formulas for calculating success.

The Social Business Objectives and Associated KPIs are:
• Foster Dialog: Share of Voice, Audience Engagement, Conversation Reach
• Promote Advocacy: Active Advocates, Advocate influence, Advocate Impact
• Facilitate Support: Resolution Rate, Resolution Time, Satisfaction Score
• Spur Innovation: Topic Trends, Sentiment Ratio, Idea Impact

We encourage you to download the full report here to get the complete context and actual formulas for these KPIs.

Note: This report was a collaborative effort by Analytics Demystified and Altimeter Group and as such there are two versions of this report. The content is identical, yet we each published under our own letterhead.

This is Open Research…

We made a conscious decision not to accept sponsors for this research and to produce it entirely at our own expense so that we could offer a genuine launching pad for social media measurement to the industry. However, this research would not have been possible without numerous contributions from social media and measurement visionaries. We thank them in the report, but it’s worth mentioning that these contributors helped illuminate the big picture of the challenges and opportunities associated with measuring social. We’re publishing this work under a Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States and encourage practitioners, vendors and consultants to adopt our framework and use it in measuring social media.

We also want to be realistic about this body of work and acknowledge that it does not answer all questions regarding the measurement of social activities. Our hope is that it offers a solid jumping off point for getting started and that each of you in the community will modify and make contributions to improve this method of measurement. We can assure you that we’ll be listening to to your feedback and will continue to update our knowledge based your feedback on this work.

Want to Contribute or Learn More?

Jeremiah and I will be conducting a webcast on June 3rd to reveal the gritty details behind the strategy and framework. Join us by registering here: Attend the no-cost webinar on Social Media Measurement.

We encourage you to embed the Slideshare link into your own sites and I’ll link to others that extend the conversation here as well.

For more white papers from Analytics Demystified, click here. Or to instantly download a PDF of this Social Marketing Analytics report click this GET IT NOW link.

Related Links:

Jeremiah Owyang, my co-author, on the Web-Strategist blog

The Altimeter Group blog posting

Social market analytics: the dark side? Posted by Dennis Howlett

Shel Holtz also recognizes “The haphazard means by which we are monitoring and measuring social media…”

cjlambert’s posterous gives us a “like” but remains skeptical on the concept that media can be measured comprehensively

Geoffroi Garon takes the report to his French speaking audience.

Marshall Sponder includes us in his Social Analytics Web Journal write-up. Marshall is also working to implement our KPIs with one of his clients. Here’s Part 1 of his multi-part series.

Kenneth Yeung delivers a fantastic synopsis of our 25 page report with once concise post on his blog, The Digital Letter, with a follow-up post here.

Research Live offered a brief write-up of the research.

@Scobleizer tweeted us! Woot!

Chelsea Nakano references our research in her ambitious post titled Everything You Need to Know About Social Media Marketing.

Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media gives us a shout out. Lisa was also an influencer that we interviewed for the research.

Christopher Berry delivers great questions and thoughts on the research in his Eyes on Analytics blog.