RMM

A summary of some old and more recent thinking:

1. 1. An activity that uses social media technologies can affect the performance of multiple business functions at the same time. For example, an activity based on Facebook and seeded within forums and social networks could help drive sales (marketing), improve a brand’s reputation (brand management) and convince existing customers to up-sell (customer experience). Therefore, ways of measuring all of these are ways to measure the success of that activity.
2. Social media environments, where brands can engage with customers and customers can engage with customers, will require new and unfamiliar metrics. It’s the same problem we faced when ‘online’ was new and fluffy. Over time, clients grew to trust specific metrics within traditional media channels - for example GRPs as a meaningful metric within TV advertising. The tendency was, therefore, to find metrics that looked similar to the ones that clients were used to, even though these might not reflect the best way to measure the effectiveness of the medium.
3. Success within social media will be due as much to the existing brand SWOTs and the assets with which the brand can fuel the conversation, as it will be an agency’s ability to improve these assets and introduce these to the right people and the right conversations. The development of social media activities works best as a partnership between the brand, its partners (including its agencies) and its customers. The quality of the input by all parties must be understood to correctly apportion praise for an activity’s success.
4. The word-of-mouth nature of how messages spread within online (and for that matter offline) conversations - and the number of different factors and people involved in their spread -  makes it hard to accurately attribute success to individual parties (such as a partner agency) within that conversation. Often we’re relying on simple econometric-lite tests (like measuring buzz) that are either too insubstantial or would cost too much to fully implement with any level of accuracy.
5. There’s a fundamental difference in the social media marketing metrics required for promotional activity within social environments (e.g. ads on Facebook) and brand-driven social activities online (e.g. responses to brand posts in forums). This difference isn’t always fully recognised within activity measurement frameworks.

As Mat always reminded me, you can’t begin to find the right solution - or solutions - until we understand and agree what the challenges are. One of things I think we lack within those companies working with, and measuring the effect of, social technologies at the moment is consensus on what the challenges of doing this are. Without this consensus, I think our chances of creating a widely accepted and implemented social media measurement framework are slim. I’d appreciate any thoughts, amends and particularly additions to the list above.