Our head of insight and social media Rolf Olsen, gives us some insight into the work he has done in the area of social media evaluation and a general state of the nation on this growing channel.
1) Why measuring online buzz can be important (for some clients, not all)
There is undoubtedly lots of hype surrounding social media today, which is all too apparent when speaking to planners and clients alike. I have observed that many campaigns tend to focus on a tiny element of social media, such as twitter, Facebook and tracking and ignore the wider scope of opportunity which social media covers. My point is if you want to use Twitter, it should not be because Twitter could offer a valuable contact point in the context of an overarching strategy, such as customer service.
From our work we have defined six distinct opportunities for social media, which undoubtedly will increase over the coming years but gives us a strategic framework for now;
Social Media Objectives
2) Why you need to get it right (hence the need for a social media audit/research as a client decides whether to ‘opt in’ to this media channel)
The next pertinent question is what strategy applies to me? So often I see this process being lead from a narrow focus, without really understanding what challenges/opportunities which social media offers.
As with all other types of media and approach, there are a number of steps that we take in order to obtain the insight required to formulate and effective social media strategy. I have seen and tried numerous approaches in this area, most which seem to gravitate towards social media search system outputs and mostly quantitative in nature. My main issue with this approach is that it does not really give me enough strategic insight to really understand how people discuss brands and products and more importantly, what opportunities that this offers.
One way to enhance the strategic output is to add a layer of qualitative research into the mix. This brings us on to our next point.
3) Researching campaigns and consumers – understanding the “what’s” and also the “why’s”. Web analytics coupled with a more qualitative approach to buzz
We understand the importance of campaign measurement, but equally numbers and statistics do not provide the insight and actionability that media agencies need to answer the question ‘what do we need to do differently?’, especially within the context of an ongoing campaign.
Campaign metrics, and the output derived from buzz measurement tools such as Radian 6 can help us with scale, reach and volume (and to an extent softer measurements such as sentiment), however it could be argued that to truly understand how a brand, product or service is existing within the social media, we need to fuse this with a qualitative element, to understand not just what is occurring, but why.
4) What it can deliver (action-ability, typical objectives it can meet etc)
Personally, I am obsessed with actionable insight and strive to define metrics for social media which can help inform performance in this area.
Looking at the industry there seems to be a clear bias towards softer brand metrics in social media, which are useful and form a big part of the work I do in this area, much akin to traditional offline brand trackers.
It struck me that social media was closer to PR than media, which prompted me to look performance metrics which are utilised in that industry. Typically, PR agencies talk of AVE (advertising value equivalent), which is a simple calculation; Reach x CPM (cost of standard advertising in publication) x PR factor (based on premise that editorial coverage is more valuable than advertising) = AVE. This formula was easy to replicate for online social media/PR activity, allowing me to measure ROI on our social media campaigns. This would naturally be in addition to the brand metrics!
While we are always looking at new ways to refine the value we deliver from this area, we now feel that we have a structured approach to social media, from insight generation to strategy to evaluation, which in my belief, has firmly established this area as a credible media component in the overall mix.
Defining metrics for social media
