Social Media Metrics and Measurements

A few days ago I got to experience the greatness that is Katie Delahaye Paine in an intimate session hosted by the Society for New Communication Research (SNCR- pronounced “snicker”).

To me, Paine managed to do what so many PR professionals profess to do (and yet don’t) – demonstrate the ROI on Social Media and especially on Social Media at the intersection of PR. Appropriately so, Paine was crowned Queen of Measurements that night.

Here are some interesting research findings shared during the session:

• 48% of Marketing and PR moving money out of advertising into social media. Only 18% moving money out of PR. It is the first time more money moving out of advertising than out of PR.
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate positive ROI.
• Only 14% of consumers trust advertisement; 78% trust peer recommendations.
• 38% of SNCR survey participating companies aren’t monitoring their brand, product, or reputation on social media—let alone measuring it.
• Facebook users translated the site to Spanish via Wiki in less than 4 weeks. The cost to Facebook? $0.
• 33% of content shared on Social Media comes from traditional media. The rest is user-generated.
• The Human Society generated $650K in new donations from an online photo contest on twitter.
• The Red Cross has been utilizing twitter updates during disaster and demonstrating increased and quantified efficiently

Key takeaways include the following:

1. Make sure you measure those goals that you are going to use. Don’t waste time on measuring things that don’t matter.
2. Thankfully, no one speaks in eyeballs anymore—we’ve finally moved to engagement.
3. It’s not about how many people you reach—it’s how they respond that matters most!
4. Unless you’re trying to coordinate multiple teams’ activities on one Social Media monitoring platform, you don’t need sophisticated monitoring tools. Google’s RSS, Twazzup (and one of my favorites: Social Mention), and a slew of other tools are sufficient. What matters is not tracking but the analysis…and this is something only humans can do in a timely and efficient matter.
5. “The Truman show will be more reality than fiction.”

The session was videotaped and streaming on Justin.tv by Rich Reader of WOMbuzz. Check out the archived video clips here.

And, the full Master Class presentation with lots of valuable data and insights is available for viewing and download below.

Sncr Smm Master Class 11 09

View more presentations from kdpaine.

Comments

[blogalize.me]

Thanks for sharing a great deal of information! I checked socialmention.com and it's a great tool. And the presentation and videos are fantastic.

Only comment regarding the "crowdsourced" translation of Facebook: it was not free. Apart from the cost of developing the technology/solution (which FB has patented, creating a problem for other companies trying to implement a similar solution), FB uses a translations company to verify (through linguistic QA) that the translations submitted by users are correct and are not "abuse" (which happened at the beginning in some languages). You could say that the cost of developing the technology will be diluted/shared by all languages, and it is a one-off, but the cost of the linguistic QA is relevant, and an ongoing one.

[Ravit Lichtenberg]

Thank you for the clarification, Blogalize! It is an important distinction. It did seem remarkable that FB would be able to accomplish this with no monitoring or moderation (the Wikipedia model). To Katie's comment, although inaccurate, one would assume it cost FB significantly less to QA the translation than to generate it. I also wonder if the shared effort resulted in greater loyalty and adoption in the Spanish market. If so, the approach may be looked upon as generating revenue--not just as cost saving.

[blogalize.me]

I agree with you with respect to the overall localization cost (monetary - not counting the development of a new technology, hours of engineering, diverting development time from other projects, et cetera. There definitely was a prioritization there, and I am happy to see that at least one company in the Silicon Valley decided to give importance to the localization technology).
I don't have data to support nor to refute the idea that the shared effort might have resulted in greater loyalty and adoption in the Spanish market, but let's not forget that their Spanish translation was done by users in more than 15 countries (therefore diluting the effect on a single market), and that those were some sort of FB geeks. And here's what I think that was the brilliant effect of the crowdsourced solution: the "cool" factor, the fact that extremely engaged users where actually building the translations. That was one of the best marketing/PR actions, and I would expect it to have been engrained, even in a subliminal way, into the collective unconscious of FB users -- something like "we are Facebook". How's that for late night sociology? :-)