360DigitalInfluence

There is a difference between “measures of success” and ROI. While everyone in the marcom chain (and those running the business) want to understand the ROI of social media, we have found it more useful now to adopt metrics that can guide a program that is underway.

Don’t get me wrong. We want to report ROI and actually can…sort of. But the ROI model requires a few key assumptions that hardened advertisers and traditional-media relations managers don’t agree on. Like:

• the value of wom “units” in relation to ad impressions or media impressions
• a definition of engagement (no, not “engagement” with an ad) and it’s relative value to purchase decisions
• the formal adoption of Net Promoter Score as a marketing metric (never mind as a pure business metric)

While we work on that, there are practical metrics that can be defined for many here-and-now digital influence programs whether they are long-term WOM initiatives or campaigns.

We use this as ingredients to a measurement recipe for every social media/WOM initiative. Each time the actual recipe is a bit different especially in weighting.

Web Metrics: This one is obvious and familiar to most people working in digital. E.g. in a social media engagement, “page views” per se may not be that important whereas in an advertising mindset page views feel like “impressions” and in fact are often reported as “page impressions.”

Word of Mouth/Net Promoter Score: Can we encourage more mentions via blogs, message boards, opinion sites? Can we create a sustained “conversation”? WOM activity is trackable. We can benchmark and see change. We can identify Promoters vs, Detractors, etc… It is based upon the “belief” that WOM recommendations and third-party support is more valuable unit-to-unit. This starts to tease the notion of “engagement” when you start to consider not just the mentions but the level of comments on a post and over what period of time. As people talk about a brand or topic they particpate and become more involved - a deeper pyschological commitment than passively experiencing ads.

Using measurement tools like BuzzLogic, Cymfony and many of the free tools on the Web, we count the mentions, classify them positive, negative and neutral at the beginnning of a campaign. We check throughout and adjust our efforts accordingly. It is not nearly as cut and dried as optimizing banner performance but conceptually it is similar.

Earned Media: Information on the Web gets picked up by journalists. If we get coverage from an online or offline journalist, that has a traditional media relations value.

Search Visibility: The new-ish approach to SEO goes beyond raising client Web pages on the first two pages of results of the top 4-5 serach engines or even beyond creating “denser” results from our domains. Now it should include third-party mentions where our pov or value proposition is stated by a third party. Clearly, this is measureable using standard SEO metrics.

Research: Often we are deploying programs that invite customer input and feedback. This is particularly true in co-creation programs. What we learn is just as valuable often more so, than traditional research such as focus groups or surveys. Charlene Li from Forrester advocates assigning some comparable value (e.g. typical focus group of 9 costs between 6k-10K, etc….). This one is hard only because it often provides value to a different department within a company. Yet the value is real.

If we build a recipe for a program from these ingredients, we can know how we are doing as we deploy a program. This approach is logical yet lacks the simplicity and standardization that every CMO, CCO and CEO craves.

It’s a start. It’s actually more than a start.