Social Media Measurement- Buzz is no substitute for business metrics

In October last year we participated in an event looking at Social Media Measurement, part of the Tools That Help Us series hosted by Claire Thompson from Waves PR and Alexander Nikolov from NinetyTen.

The event featured a range of suppliers of social media measurement tools to the PR industry, including Radian6, Onalytica and iVantage (a Google Analytics specialist). CANDDi isn’t a social media measurement tool specifically, but that is one application of its powerful ability to track individuals across time and platforms, so we were happy to be invited along.

It occurred to me as I was preparing our intro to CANDDi that social media measurement today suffers from many of the same problems as the PR industry has for years: how do you connect activity to impact and prove return on investment?

Measurement in marketing happens at a number of different points in the cycle.

• Most simply you can measure outbound activity, but this is a long way removed from pounds and pence on the bottom line.
• One step closer to the important stuff is the impact of your activity - e.g. media coverage.
• Most social media monitoring tools operate one stage beyond this: tracking the reception your activity gets and how the audience and its influencers are responding in terms of volume and rough approximations of sentiment.
• At the next stage is your more traditional web analytics: what traffic has been driven to the website from which the prospect might convert.
• The ultimate measurement is in pounds and pence: what additional sales has the activity driven.

The challenge comes in connecting specific conversions to the original activity, showing cause and effect. i.e. Customer X converted because he read this article - or more likely, saw this combination of advert, articles and social media.

This is where CANDDi can help out, tracking an individual through each interaction with a brand to tell the marketer what activity was important and what was not. It’s not an application we have ready today, but it has certainly spurred some interesting conversations with prospects.

Give us a call if you’d like to know more.