Desperately seeking metrics: what’s the business case for social media?

Posted on 01. May, 2008 by Kelly Feller in Measurement, Social Media

About a week ago I became famous. Well, ok–famous inside the company where I work. But since that company (Intel) employs around 85,000 people, I’m going to do a happy dance for this proverbial five minutes of fame as they may be all I get. How did this come about? Recently the team of company journalists who publish our intranet found my internal company blog on social media and decided to link to it on the front page of the intranet website. This sparked an amazing dialogue, with nearly 9,000 views and 50 comments. And it was interesting to see the reactions of folks from a company like Intel–where it’s not unusual to run into colleagues who have worked at the company for 30+ years. (Intel is celebrating its 40th year this year).

My blog post, and the subsequent discussion, focused on whether employees should be encoraged to participate in social media externally. (Internally we already encourage the use of blogs, the Intelpedia wiki, and other collaboration tools). And I was surprised to see how widely people’s sentiment of social media varied. From extreme “be very afraid” to “keep up the good work,” many of these comments asked for the same thing: show me why.

Being the good marketer that I am, I scuried back to my cube to roll up my sleeves and track down how to measure the effectiveness of our social media (marketing) efforts so I could return and win over all the naysayers. Simple task, right? Not!

It turns out that measuring the “value” of corporate social media (marketing) efforts is an inexact science. Folks are definately talking about it–like Jeremiah Owyang and Rodney Rumford from Forrester. And their fresh approach helps us get closer to analyzing how social media efforts make a difference in a corporate marketing strategy. For example, they ask us as marketers to move beyond traditional marketing metrics that measure quantitative data like page views and clickthroughs–essentially traffic. Instead they suggest that we measure “engagement” and focus on these key areas:

  • Involvement - are customers present? (includes traditional analytics like traffic)
  • Interaction - are our customers are taking action? (downloading white papers, etc.)
  • Intimacy - what is customer sentiment or affinity? (how they feel about us)
  • Influence - are customers are talking about us?

But now that we know what to measure, it’s how to measure that is the next chapter in this ongoing saga. And we at Intel are definately working on that right now as we analyze several pilots that measure the tone of conversations both on and off domain. We’re also looking to capture the frequency with which our products are mentioned in certain dialogues or discussions.

In essence, however, social media makes tracking the ROI of marketing programs more complicated. No longer do easily digested and spit-out metrics–like traffic–successfully capture the effect a company’s social media (marketing) efforts are having on how their customers feel about them. And this makes marketers and company executives who are constantly analyzing the return on investment crazy. I suppose I better be careful. I wouldn’t want to be famous for that.

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14 Comments

Posted in Measurement, Social Media

14 Responses to “Desperately seeking metrics: what’s the business case for social media?”

  1. Greg de Lima

    02. May, 2008

    I actually posted something similar to this. Using twitter as a CR tool, and how it can in crease sales.

  2. Linda Bustos

    02. May, 2008

    I think corporate blogging, as it becomes more popular, will be expected by customers, stakeholders etc. Customers will expect openness, knowledge sharing (thought leadership), 2-way conversation etc., kind of how an email address and website are “givens” now.

  3. Tom O'Brien

    02. May, 2008

    Hi Kelly:

    This is indeed a big question - we have a metric we are currently using (Online Promoter Score) to measure SM program ROI. Case study here:

    http://humanvoice.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/social-media-measurement/

    This is a big deal - and we have made significant investments in linking social media (conversation) measures to real world results - like sales.

    (We have done some work for Intel - if you’d like to see.)

    Tom O’Brien
    MotiveQuest LLC

  4. Jen Harris

    02. May, 2008

    Kelly-
    GREAT article. I am currently putting together a “tracking plan” for a future product launch that is reflective of a New Media Matrix that I made (I will share w/others soon). It’s not going to give us exact ROI, but it will give us a way to track the conversations and reason to keep giving me a check 2x/mo!
    I have said for over 2 years, that New Media does not have exacts (like x # of people will drive by this billboard/day) and therefore you have to show OLD metrics like hits, responses, trackbacks etc.
    Explaining this to executives is very difficult when they only understand traditional media, so thank you for the “back-up”.
    -jen

  5. audra

    02. May, 2008

    One of the leaders of our company put together a visual presentation to cover this very matter. Check it out on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/themoleskin/social-media-measurement

  6. Michael Brito

    02. May, 2008

    @Kelly

    Judging from the title of the post, I assume you are a Madonna fan, right?

  7. Kelly Feller

    02. May, 2008

    @Michael

    Who isn’t a Madonna fan? Maybe I’m just showing my age.

  8. Brian Carter

    02. May, 2008

    This is where we’re at, as an interactive agency- SEM dept- how do we measure success in SMM/SMO for clients, and of course, before that, sell the service.

    To me, we’re not moving forward from metrics like traffic to engagement, we’re moving backward from conversion metrics… but I think this is ok because social media is more like PR than advertising. It’s more branding and warming ppl up than direct marketing.

  9. Kelly Feller

    02. May, 2008

    For those monitoring this conversation, here is an interesting video that features yet another metrics measurement tool: Buzzlogic. http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2008/05/gntv-how-buzzlo.html

  10. DL Byron

    03. May, 2008

    Metrics is and has been the greatest challenge and it’s even more challenging now with recent changes Google made to it’s cache. There’s a near ‘insta-cache” now with Google so that’s a moving target. I think it’s a aggregate approach, look at multiple metrics and average them out and also keep it simple with goals like, increase page rank to 7 or mentions more than X, or we sold more stuff. Neilsen recently abandoned impressions for good reason and since the beginning of webtime, marketing has tried to apply ROI to much that wasn’t measurable in those terms.

    An simple example is the little badges of courage bloggers use on their site (delicious, facebook, etc). Anyone every actually measure if those are ever clicked, like ever? Why would you a user do that , when you can just bookmarlet them from your own browser or just go that site and post there. Point is, there’s much groupthink in social media, and that’s only getting harder to quantify.

  11. laurent

    05. May, 2008

    ‘How to measure’ is tricky. Companies measure how many widgets they shipped, how many clicked they got. It’s relatively easy and universal + companies control the raw information needed for the metrics. With social media, conversations happen everywhere/anywhere. Companies have no control other that. And there’re many ways to slice what is said.
    After all, its about people talking, active listening of what’s being said by them should be the most relevant ways to build social media metrics.

  12. Rachel Luxemburg

    05. May, 2008

    When I started my marketing career, the idea that we could get concrete ROI on specific marketing was barely on the radar screen. Direct mail marketers could get response rate numbers, and PR people could count clippings, but by and large marketing was much more an art than a science.

    Fast forward a decade or so, and here we are discussing whether any marketing effort that doesn’t have a clear ROI is even worth doing! I wonder what we’ll be discussing another 10 years from now.

  13. Michael Valiant

    07. May, 2008

    I think a lot of us share this pain!

    Not being able to show concrete numbers can make it difficult to justify involvement.

    At this point unfortunately, sometimes the easiest way to get your company involved is to show them what your competitors are doing…

    Executive hates being left out ;)

  14. Nicky Jameson

    07. Feb, 2009

    Just came upon this post through a search. You may be interested in the post I did on my blog recently.
    http://nickyjameson.com/2009/01/26/social-media-business-objectives-the-basis-for-social-media-metrics/

    I think the problem is people trying to measure Social Media metrics rather than what Social media helps execs to achieve - business objectives.  It’s a waste of time to expect executives to accept what they can’t count… every time I’ve had to do a business case I have had to make projections… executives want to show they met budget because if they don’t they get canned.

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