R*M recently joined the IAB and accordingly have been asked to join the Social Media Council. As a result we’re contributing a chapter to their new handbook on the subject. Our contribution will cover the holy grails of planning, measuring and predicting the impact of social media campaigns. In many ways its the same KUDOS mantra that we’ve been chanting for the past few months, although we’ve also learned some things about how we can measure the impact. If you’re interested I’ve posted the text from the essay after the jump. (Please remember its long and unlinked as it is going into a printed doc).
Planning and measuring social media
1. The social media difference
Faced by issues such as media fragmentation and device convergence, brands are hoping social media might be some form of panacea. And while they’re seeing a lot of interesting ways to interact with their audience, it’s hard to know which ones are worth pursuing. Most social media activities sit outside of the established media planning and measurement frameworks that advertising relies upon. It is clear that if brands are going to use social media they need an organised way of planning their activities and measuring their impact.
Of course, the issue is that no-one quite knows what the impact of a social media activity is going to be until it is running. Not that traditional media has it any better – there’s no more of a guarantee that a TV advert will be more motivating to an audience than a blog post. However, experience gathered over many years and the acceptance of media owners’ audience estimation processes is enough to assuage most doubts. Social media has neither of these, which creates the challenge and the opportunity – to find new ways to plan activities and measure effectiveness.
A significant difference between social media and traditional broadcast media is that, as we’re reliant on the audience for our distribution, we can’t just ‘buy’ eyeballs. Therefore, considering the balance between the interests of both the brand and audience is vital. Both parties have a strong vested interest in what is being communicated and the way it spreads – it helps to think of it as a contract or transaction, with the brand and the audience as the signatories.
We believe a framework for thinking is required to help us plan activities, estimate and measure results. This framework is based on five principles of good social media marketing. And significantly, each of these is important to both the brand and to the audience. In this way we make sure that the interests of each are not just represented, but become shared.
i) An activity needs to be knowledgeable; it needs to impart some of the brand’s knowledge to an interested audience.
ii) It needs to be useful, not just to the brand but to the audience as well.
iii) It should contain an element that is desirable to both the audience and to the brand.
iv) The whole activity should be open, both literally and figuratively. The brand should be transparent about their motivations, and the audience should be able to engage and interact with the activity.
v) And finally it should be shareable. The brand should be providing something of value to the audience, and the audience should be able to take it away and share it with others.
These five principles can be represented by the simple acronym KUDOS: Knowledgeable, Useful, Desirable, Open and Shareable.
2. Planning social media activities
We use KUDOS in workshops as a guide to which activities and tactics might work best; as a checklist to make sure each component is knowledgeable, useful, desirable, open and shareable. These activities might vary wildly from one brief to another – from content and information to fuel conversations, to tools and services that might facilitate community action. The KUDOS framework allows for this variance while maintaining a uniformity that makes a comparison of metrics possible.
3. Estimating results
During the planning stage, we look at each of the five KUDOS elements for the proposed activity and give them a qualitative score out of five, based on benchmarks created from previous campaigns. We then use this as one of a number of factors in estimating the likely interest in an activity.
4. Measuring the success of the activity
The issue with social media is not finding things to measure – there’s an embarrassment of riches in terms of data – but knowing which metrics are useful and meaningful. We use the KUDOS framework to select five attributes that allow us to track and optimise activity.
As an example, blog relations activity and downloadable video content might use the following metrics:
Blog measures could include
K: In-bound links
U: Google Page Rank
D: Page views
O: Comments
S: Subscriptions to RSS
Video measures could include
K: In-bound links
U: Downloads
D: Total views
O: Comments
S: Re-postings
5. Measuring the impact and effect
What we haven’t done here yet is measured the effect. The effect is difficult to measure as it occurs over a long period of time, happens in many disparate locations and can be attributed to many factors. But it’s possible to use social media to provide some indication of the effect.
We can use various standard digital measurement techniques to track people who click through directly from one of our social media assets to purchase or register. However, it’s much harder to estimate how many more people might have heard about our product via the word-of-mouth our social media activity has generated, and then acted upon this information.
Furthermore, traditional media uses complex (and often expensive) econometrics processes to gauge the effects of their brand building efforts – but this will be beyond the social media budgets of most clients.
In both these cases, some indication of the effect of social media activity can be found by measuring the change in the interest level around the brand or product. We do this by analysing its share of conversation online.
By looking at the volume and quality of the commentary around a brand, we are able to see the accumulative effect of all its marketing and offline activity. One should note that this is not a stand-alone measure of the change caused by social media; it is a measure of the impact as it occurs in social media. However, by drilling into this data and analysing what topics people are talking about, we may be able to attribute some of the effect.
