Developing a Best Practices Approach to Social Media Measurement

Submitted by josh.braaten@ra... on 11/04/2011 / 0 Comments

Social media measurement was such a theme in the Measurement, ROI and Search track of the 2011 MIMA Summit that they could have renamed it the Social Media Measurement track. Of all the sessions, Edelman Digital Vice President of Digital Analytics Chuck Hemann’s focused the most on creating a true framework for social media metrics during his presentation, Developing a Best Practices Approach to Social Media Measurement.
A Framework for Social Media Measurement
Hemann discussed five steps for not only measuring social media, but acting upon it as well:

1. Listen - In this step, Hemann covered a number of social listening tools that covered areas such as sentiment analysis, complaints and compliments, and topics of interest to customers.
2. Integrate - In this phase, all the data collected in the Listen stage is filtered to identify the needs and motivations of the customer and align them with the goals and objectives of the business.
3. Communicate - Hemann discussed the many ways a brand can respond to social media posts (e.g., one-to-one, one-to-many, etc.) and stressed the importance of having a response matrix in place to easily help employees decide how to response to social media activity.
4. Distribute - Hemann’s dashboards and metrics to measure were a hit with the audience. He stayed after the session to explain weighted averages, normalization of stats and tweaks to data in Excel. He outlined which metrics to measure and touched on distribution of the data.
5. Measure - Many companies skip this step, but Hemann stressed the importance of using data collected from the social media measurement framework and using it to drive and roll out improvements within the company.

The important thing is not to follow this process perfectly, but to have a process in place before embarking on any major social media initiative.

Hemann said that often companies will bring him in on a project at the last minute. “Measurement can be tough to integrate into a project at the end,” he said, and encouraged the audience to bring someone like him in on the project early to maximize chances for success.

What steps are critical in your social media measurement process? Do you have a structured process in place to determine how you respond to your audience? Which metrics drive your organization’s social media strategy?

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A special thanks to Josh Braaten, a MIMA volunteer, for this blog post. Josh is an Online Marketing Manager at Rasmussen College. He has worked in marketing and on websites for over five years. Josh also has a B.A. in Economics from St. John’s University. Josh loves Internet marketing and blogs about SEO, web analytics and related topics on his Internet marketing blog. Connect with Josh on Twitter,LinkedIn, and +Josh Braaten.