Social media measurement

May 19, 2009 by Dirk Singer

One of the corporate barriers to going social that David Griner identified in his recent presentation was the lack of ROI. That argument always seems a little odd to me, as arguably anything that happens online is inherently measurable.

And while doing a project for a client to identify online influencers I went into Delicious to search for bookmarked pages that combined the tags “socialmedia” and “measurement.” The result? 2302 bookmarks. The fact is we’ve got measurement coming out of our ears.

Too much measurement?

Which could be exactly the issue. There’s too much noise, which when you are dealing with general social media confusion anyway, causes those who are hearing it to switch off.

At the recent Interactive Advertising Bureau conference in New York (we’ve just joined the UK chapter), association president Randall Rothenberg said that, according to econsultancy, “the problem online is never measurability. It’s that you can measure too many things.”

“Anything you want online is directly measurable. But are you applying the right metrics? Working in the traditional media and marketing world, that answer is very simple. Social media is very easy to measure. But first you need to figure out your objective.”

The other problem is that there is no real right answer when it comes to identifying influencers. Given that social media influence works in a ripple (see David Armano’s seminal diagram) and not linear effect there are arguably any number of combinations you could put together to reach your goal. There are no right answers, simply some that are more right than others.

Engagement, trust and reach

So what are the right metrics when measuring influence? For me it boils down to three factors: 1) Engagement, 2) Trust and 3) Reach

Engagement. Are people at all bothered by what someone is posting about? The AdAge Power 150 (the ranking of the world’s top 1000 English language marketing blogs) recently changed its measurement to give engagement the highest weighting by introducing Post Rank scores. Post Rank (see widget on the right) scores blog posts based on reactions (saves, comments etc) to them – rather than Technorati just counting links.

Trust There’s an adage that links are the currency of the Internet. That’s true, though there is a flaw in that not all links are created equally – and links can also be manufactured. As opposed to Technorati, Swedish blog search engine Twingly claims to measure ‘trust’ which it says is much more than just a score based on links.

Quoted in the Blog Herald in December, Twingly boss Anton Johnannson claimed, “Technorati Authority is just a number that don’t say so much (sic). Twingly BlogRank is trust.” And in fairness, the Twingly blog score does seem to work better than the Technorati one.

It’s also better in breaking down foreign language sites. Rather than Technorati, where everything is lumped together, Swedish sites are given scores out of ten vs other Swedish sites, German sites are ranked against other German sites and so on.

Reach. Again with a huge caveat that it’s not a numbers game. As Augustine Fou said in his recent Click Z article, “the ROI of social media is zero”, it’s not about one site hitting 10 people and the next 1000, it’s about what those ten people do and who they are.

And for reach, I prefer RSS subscriber numbers – ie people who have bookmarked you and hang around – over raw visitors who could be transient. It’s not perfect as it’s reliant on Feedburner, but one tool that shows RSS is Feed Compare (spotted via Church Crunch).

Finally, some good advice from Chris Lake of econsultancy, “Let it Breathe.” The whole point of social media is that it’s meant to work over time rather than work like a slot machine where you put your money in and something instantly comes out. Any measurement system will really only give you a snapshot of what’s going on, but not the bigger picture.

As Chris says: “you’ll need to give your social media strategy time. Like a good wine, it needs to breathe. In doing so you will be able to look at your overall business performance, as well as the performance of your social media campaigns over the duration. “

Image – Aussie Gall