Measuring consumer-generated media

Katie Delahaye Paine led off the afternon with a presentation on New Rulers for a new century: How to measure consumer-generated media.

Why bother? Christian Science Monitor found that information distributed to bloggers generated 3.4 times more traffic than ABC News. Bloggers fit the profile of “influentials.” Blogs have eyeballs.

How to measure blogs? The methodology is similar to traditional media. Measure traffic. Examine content. Analyse.

Another indicators to look at with blogs: The ratio of postings to comments. If you post regularly but generate few comments, you might conclude that your content is not really having impact.

Measure three things:

  1. Outputs: What did you send out?
  2. Outtakes: What did your audience hear and remember?
  3. Outcomes: What did you change? Attitudes? Behaviour?

Steps to perfect measurement:

  1. Define your mission and goals. You have to know what you want to do to know if you did it.
  2. Prioritize your audiences and your needs. Social media is not “one audience.” It’s a variety of groups and individuals with a special interest or perspective on you.
  3. What’s the measure of success? Decide what you want to quantify as an expression of your goals. Sales? Complaints? Reputation? Something else?
  4. Pick a tool and undertake research. Traffic to Web site?  Sales? Increase in the conversation index? Share of positioning on key issues? Share of recommendations?
  5. Determine what you are benchmarking against. Previous performance? Competitors?
  6. Analyse results and figure out what it means.
  7. Pick a tool. There are good free tools: Google News/Google blogs. Technorati. Sphere. There are good for-pay tools: Cyberalert. CustomScoop. e-Watch. RSS feeds. Use automated tools to handle the gross aspects of measurement. Monitoring and searching. Use human judgment to interpret.
  8. Analyse the content. The data without analysis has no value. Focus your analysis on issues that will be meaningful or have a direct bearing on the decisions your management must take or the questions they want answered.
  9. Take action

And how about ROI? With blogging, why bother? If it costs you $14.99 to do something  – and blogs can be done for virtually no cost – why spend thousands to measure it.

But if you are spending a lot on a social media program, be prepared to spend a lot measuring it’s results.

As I listened to Katie – who is one of THE experts on measurement – I realized just how much work is still to be done in developing broadly accepted measurement indices for social media. It’s still early days. But right now, we seem to be attempting to stretch ill fitting traditional measures to match the new shape of social media. It may look like it’s working. But anyone who’s involved in it knows it’s not comfortable.

  • http://alanchumley.wordpress.com Alan Chumley

    Joe,

    Katie is indeed a very bright mind in measurement. A maven even. :) The premise of using traditional (off line) methods to measure emerging social media is a source of some discomfort for me as well and it may be for others in the measurement industry until we can figure something else out. To be fair, I suspect even Katie (I wasn’t at the event) presented this as one answer for now and not the end all be all going forward. So for that she an anyone else offering up ansers are to be congratulated. And I suppose I should point out that she is, as I am, a proponent of measuring across a number of media and indicators, so the point about spending money to measure blogs is moot as we’re really talking about spending money to measure (period) and folding blogs as one among many micro areas into a broader sort of quintessential macro view. Or ‘dashboard’ in Katie speak.

    In terms of using traditional methods, I do agree that, in terms of measuring outcome, measuring relationships has some merit. It’s something that the industry doesn’t do enough of yet. So perhaps it’s not so traditional afterall.

    There’s another view out there that blogs are really best looked on as networks or communities of interest and that they should be measured as such. But how does one measure something so nebulous as a node, network or a community? One answer lies in Social Network Theory and Social Network Analysis. It’s been around for moons academically and has been seconded commercially for use in, among others, organizational behaviour and management studies.

    Hill and Knowlton has recently introduced Communications Mapping or what they call their Influencer Network Analysis ( http://www.hillandknowlton.com/commsmapping ) suite of services as a way of measuring the extent and reach of key influencers, the inter-relationships and inter-connectedness to one another as it relates to an issue, organization, product, media outlet and so on. It’s a great demonstration of who one’s stakeholders really are (you may be surprised to note who, beyond your list of usual suspects, pops up) really are and who sho should be engaged.

    Perhaps not the first, nor the last to use this general approach or other potentially more sophisticated iterations to come, but interesting stuff nonetheless.

    http://www.hillandknowlton.com/commsmapping