The holy grail of determining true social media ROI is to be able to line social media activities up to sales. The relationships are valuable, yes. So is the engagement, the content, the brand awareness. But ultimately, you’re building all of those things so that you can increase the odds that people will spend money on you, donate to your cause, or otherwise help you further your business goals.

The trick here is that tying social media activity to your sales database means that you need to do the work to correlate the data. You’ll probably never be able to determine strict and untainted cause as it relates to social media activity and sales, but there are some ways to compare your social media channels to your other ones and see how they’re impacting the bottom line.

Today, we’ll explore 10 Key Sales Metrics to Track, and the importance of comparing your social media to your more mainstream efforts.

1. Lead Volume

One of the most straightforward measurements, measuring lead volume is just that. How many leads did you get through particular channels? That means the event you went to, or the contact form on your website, or signups for your webinar. There’s also a difference between any lead (just some contact information) and a qualified lead, which means they’ve crossed a certain threshold of direct, demonstrated interest in buying from you.

What that is is ultimately up to you, but you probably know when a contact moves from filling out a form to something “warmer”.

2. Cost Per Lead

Assessing the cost per lead means determining what it cost you to get it. That includes investment of time, manpower, and capital expenditures (like registration or sponsorship costs for an event, or hard costs of setting up website pages or lead gen mechanisms).

Again, I think here it’s more valuable to look at the cost of *qualified* leads, because they’re the ones that will take the most investment to get, generally speaking. Take your total cost for one particular lead generation channel, like Twitter. Look at how much time your folks log on there each day (approximations are okay unless you want to get really granular about it), and their average hourly cost (including salary, benefits, overhead). Divide that number by the number of qualified leads you get in a given period.

Measuring this in individual channels – Twitter vs. Newsletter vs. Events – is where the valuable data starts to emerge about ROI, and what efforts yield the most.

3. Lead Value

A bit more sophisticated than just the cost of a lead, this helps you determine how much that lead may ultimately be worth to you and your company. It requires a bit more math, so bear with me here. And of course, like all of this, the magic is in comparing this metric across several channels to determine those that are returning the best lead value to you overall.

You’ll need to determine:

• The potential deal value of that lead were it to close or, retroactively, the actual dollar value of the deal once that lead does close.
• Your average customer retention rate (see below)
• Your average conversion rate for new deals

Then you need to do this math:

((Deal Value for Qualified Lead) x Customer Retention Rate) x Average Conversion Rate

The true value of the lead is effectively it’s profitability, or how much you stand to gain from it after you factor in how long you keep customers, and how well you close deals. Also remember that you need to use the same period of time for all of these. If you’re looking at a deal value for a 12 month period, you should also use the retention rate and close rate figures for a 12 month timeframe.

(Hat tip to Christopher Penn for making this formula easy to understand, and spreading the gospel in Blue Sky Factory webinars like this one).

4. Conversion Rate (And Channel Conversion Rate)

Simply put, this is the percentage of leads that convert to actual sales. Otherwise known as your close rate, you can track conversion rates for other things, like newsletter signups, but in this context we’re tracking sales.

Ideally, you should know your average conversion rate across your entire business, as well as breaking this out into the varying channels and methods you’re using to generate leads. This is where you can really start seeing how social media is performing against your channels that have non-social touchpoints.

It also requires taking your sales databases and actually tracking those prospects and leads that either originate through or have touchpoints within social media channels (and which ones) so you can distinguish them. Some ideas for the types of conversions you might want to track:

• offline and in-person events
• engagement interactions (commenters, blog subscribers, Facebook Fans)
• newsletter and email subscribers
• website referral traffic and inbound link traffic
• organic search traffic
• content leads (whitepaper downloads, webinars, other people’s blog posts)

There are more ways to dice that up, but you get the idea.

5. Referrals

Are you tracking the people that come to you by way of other people? You should be.

Referrals are a key source of income for many businesses, and you ought to be finding ways to track when a lead originates via another person. If they cite directly that they were referred, that’s easy. But it’s also important to ask when you can, such as on online forms, about whether someone else recommended you to them. And remember, recommendations and referrals don’t always come from your customers. They can come from the community at large, too, based solely on your reputation or brand awareness.

6. Retention Rate

It’s important to know how long your customers stick around once you’ve got them. Are they one and done? Do they renew their subscriptions or go elsewhere based on price or other criteria? Do they buy from you multiple times in a year-long period?

Look at the percentage of customers who are still with you after 6 months, 12 months, or two years. Look at the percentage of those that renew (and even those that upgrade their product or service). Obviously, the higher the retention rate, the better.

7. Average Transaction Value or Average Account Value

This is another important metric to track over time, as well as to break out by some key channels or media types in order to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of those channels.

Average transaction value is just that: taking the total value of all of the sales and purchases by a single customer in a fixed timeframe, and dividing that by the number of purchases they make overall. Likewise, the average account value is determined by taking your total sales for a period of time – say, six months – and dividing it by the number of active and current customers or accounts you have in that same time period.

Break out these numbers by media type – say, the transaction value for accounts that touch a social media channel vs. those that don’t – and you can start to see the impact value of having social media interactions to enhance sales (or not).

Bonus round: Look for the accounts that increase in value by more than X percent in a given time period, to see what channels or customer touchpoint paths (i.e. those that sub your newsletter, attend your webinar, AND met you at an event) net the best results over time.

8. Sales Value Per Fan/Follower

In order to determine a value per fan or follower, you have to determine the overall value of the medium itself.

That means if you want to know how much you can count on a Twitter follower to bring in in terms of revenue, you have to know how much revenue Twitter helps bring in for you as a whole. You can determine this in an exclusive fashion, by tracking direct sales using unique offers for that one media type that aren’t used anywhere else.

You can also track sales that have an impact point in Twitter by indicating which of your prospects are also Twitter followers, and better yet, which of them have had direct interaction with you there. That indicates potential influence over the sales likelihood, but not necessarily that it’s where the transaction initiated or ended.

Still with me? Have a look at this post over on my Altitude Branding blog for a bit more about determining the value of fans and followers.

9. Time to Close

A next level of the conversion rate is the conversion time, or how long it takes you to move from the initial acquisition of the lead to closing the deal.

This of course only applies to accounts you’ve actually closed, but it can give you insight into how long your sales cycle typically is, and what touchpoints you often need to have along the way to meet that average. It’s also a good way to diagnose what happens in a particularly short close process (did they have more interaction with you via your blog, perhaps? Get referred by a friend?), and particularly long ones (maybe a cold lead you got in a giveaway at an event).

Justifying your social media efforts can be easier if you show that your close time decreases by a certain amount when you you have consistent social media touchpoints with those people. Or, conversely, if your social media efforts don’t impact this process at all, perhaps the value in them lies elsewhere.

10. Highest Value Lead Sources

Using the above metrics like lead value, conversion rate, and time to close, you can start looking at and comparing the leads and sales that:

• Originated in social media
• Originated offline, like at an event, and didn’t have social media connections
• Originated offline, but touched other online channels
• Originated through the website or newsletter, and moved or touched other channels

See where I’m headed here? What you’re looking for are the common denominators for which paths of connection with your company are generating the highest overall lead, account, or transaction value over time. It requires some data crunching, and lots of analysis to see where the overlaps are. But if you’re really serious about directing your time and efforts only to the places with proven and direct ROI in the past, that’s how you get there.

Is there value in investing in places with out that proof? Heck yes. Is there value to social media beyond just sales? Absolutely. But that, my friends, is a discussion for another day. Or year. Or a bunch of social media blogs.

So then. That’s today’s list of 10 Key Sales Metrics as they can apply to social media and help you justify your time spent there. What are yours?

image credit: alancleaver_2000

The Chancellor’s Debate is today’s hot topic, being picked apart by political and financial analysts.  Here at 6Consulting the most interesting perspective is how the debate has crossed over to social media, and how a bit of social media analysis using Radian6 can help make sense of it. The last blog post looked at buzz levels in social media around the Political Parties, and questioned whether this could predict the outcome.  Here I want to look at sentiment expressed in social media and whether this can help formulate a prediction?

There was a great blog post published this morning  by Rory Cellan-Jones which discussed social media, in particular Twitter, and how it was being utilised as a debating platform for ‘virtual cheerleaders’.  The blog questions whether we can gauge opinion polls through Twitter?  In my opinion, although Twitter is an important aspect of social media, a more comprehensive set of locations should be analysed to make the prediction.  Radian6 can search and gauge sentiment contained in a wide variety of locations which fall under the ‘social media’ umbrella.  These include:

• Mainstream Media
• Micro Media
• Blog Posts and Comments
• Forums Posts and Replies
• Image and Video Sites
• Social Networks

I used Radian6 to locate mentions of the three ‘would be Chancellors’ Alistair Darling, George Osborne and Vince Cable in social media.  Over the last week there were nearly 20,000 mentions of the three men in social media.  Focusing on sentiment of the three MPs between Sunday and Tuesday, Radian6 calculates the following:

Figure 1: Sentiment Expressed Towards Vince Cable

The Liberal Democrat candidate enjoys generally favourable sentiment.  By many he was seen as the victor of the debate.  Comments included:

“Vince Cable was best.  He seemed sincere.  I may vote Lib Dem as opposed to Tory” a Tweet by @GaryM1976

“Vince Cable was the clear winner in the chancellor debate” a Tweet by @GavinAldrich

There was also a Daily Telegraph article entitled “Vince Cable for Chancellor?” which discusses the media’s views of the MP, the Telegraph praising him for “exploiting audience -and presumably public – hostility towards Labour and the Tories.”

From a social media perspective Vince Cable proved a serious contender for the Chancellor’s position.  How have Alistair Darling and George Osborne faired?

Darling succeeded in having over 50% of the mentions assessed as positive:

Figure 2: Sentiment Expressed Towards Alistair Darling

Osborne faired the worst of the three contenders, with 57% of posts between Sunday and Tuesday having a negative sentiment towards the Conservative.

Figure 3: Sentiment Expressed Towards George Osborne

Critics suggested:

“I said a month ago George Osborne was the Tory front line’s weakest link and I was right.” Tweet by @SidCPsgriffin

“I don’t think George Osborne has done himself any favours tonight.” Tweet by @Lloyd_Rees

Automated sentiment is not as accurate as manual sentiment analysis, but it does provide a good basis of what opinion is out there in social media.  From the above data we can see that Vince Cable is a popular choice for Chancellor by social media users.  In the terms of Radian6′s automated sentiment Vince Cable comes out on top in social media!  It will be interesting to see whether this is reflected later this year in the election results.

David Barber: Data Analyst at 6Consulting

Twitter: @davidbarber6c

Admit it…at some point in your life when you were trying to cram last minute for an exam or trying to wrap your mind around a difficult subject, you attempted osmosis. It didn’t work. Neither did learning exclusively from a text book. No matter what your learning style may be, isn’t it always a bit easier to digest the material you are learning when you have the opportunity to go beyond the text book and put theory into practice?

Education is to be taken seriously because we are shaping the minds and skill sets of our future leaders. However, the setting for learning should be a playground where students have the ability to get their hands dirty, explore and discover without fear. Measurement is a complex skill that should be learned and cultivated on the playground instead of the first day on the job. There is no magic button to push to measure outcomes. Nor can it be learned or completed through osmosis.

One skill any business or communications professional must become adept at is measurement. Not just the aggregation of data, but the ability to sort through data, analyze and sync up that data with measurable business objectives while gleaning valuable insights. It is vital to go beyond tracking outputs (physical products, such as articles and blog posts) and outtakes (public take-aways, such as messages) to reveal how business and marketing strategies intersect with online and offline relationships, resulting in quantifiable changes in attitudes, behaviors or opinions. Outputs and outtakes are relatively easy to monitor, but outcome based measurement is more tedious to track over time because action must be determined and tied to the all-important ROI.

Students need to have a solid understanding of what is important to measure and how to write goals and objectives. On the playground, different tools and methodologies should be explored to dig deep into how influence, reach and sentiment correlates with business-consumer strategies, objectives and relationships. This is why Radian6 has offered several instructors and students access to the Radian6 platform this semester through the Radian6 Higher Ed Trial Program (details below).

We asked Dr. Elaine Young, Associate Professor of Marketing at Champlain College and currently using our tool for hands-on training in her classroom, should social media metrics be taught in the classroom and in what context?

“For the marketing/PR major it is vital that they understand how to measure their efforts, to set clear goals and learn how to use those metrics to make solid business decisions or test new ideas. The power of web analytics allows you to look at the quantitative side – what is the path they took, how did they get here, how long did they stay and did they convert?  If we didn’t have social media influencing the SEO results and being indexed by search engines it might not be so vital, but now, with the continued growth in social media and consumer generated content we MUST have ways in which to monitor not just what has been said about our brand, but also know where it was written, the reach of the information and how we should respond.”

Forget osmosis. Get your hands dirty. If you are a faculty member or student, consider applying for the our Higher Ed Trial Program. Not a student? It is never to late to learn. By understanding how, why and what to measure, you give yourself and your department a voice that can and will be heard by the C-suite.

Apply Now for Radian6 Higher Ed Trial Program – Submission Deadline, 31 March

We are very excited about the response received so far about the Radian6 Higher Ed Trial Program for the Spring 2010 semester! Though Session 3 candidates have already been selected and are in the middle of their trial program access now, faculty members (on behalf of their undergraduate classes) and graduate students can still apply to use the Radian6 platform for four weeks at no cost for the final session (5-30 April) of the Spring 2010 semester.

Each Radian6 Higher Education Trial Program session is for a period of thirty days only. To be considered as a candidate for this trial program, you must be a faculty member representing one undergraduate class or a graduate student currently enrolled in an accredited college/university. Each candidate will receive a training webinar. A webinar is mandatory before having access to the platform. We host them live via web conference, and they’re super easy. They take about 30 minutes, and are designed to help answer your questions and give you a solid walk-through of our platform. Up to two additional hours of training will be be given to each candidate throughout the trial session to assist with their area of research.

Currently, we are only accepting three candidates (two undergraduate classes and one graduate student) per session throughout the Spring 2010 semester. The submission deadline for Session 4 is 31 March. Candidates will be notified of selection 2 April.

Please email the following information to Lauren Vargas at lauren.vargas@radian6.com:

First Name:
Last Name:
College/University:
City, State, Country:
Work Phone:
Email Address:

If a student, what is your class standing?:

• Freshman
• Sophomore
• Junior
• Senior
• Graduate Study

If a faculty member, what are your research specialties or teaching interests using the Radian6 platform?

If a graduate student, what are your research specialties using the Radian6 platform?

…

Along the way, we will share our findings and feedback with you about how students are experiencing and using the platform. So, apply today to become a part of the trial program or please pass along to educators and other relevant college/university programs.

It’s been an incredible year at Radian6, with lots of amazing things happening, the launch (now in preview) of our new Engagement Console, events, great clients, you name it.

And with that kind of activity comes growth, including growth for our community team. You’re probably already acquainted with Lauren Vargas, Katie Morse, and Teresa Basich, who are doing some great work to help support our customers and community with content, engagement and connection, and presence at events. And of course there’s David Alston, the captain of our community ship.

We’re now on the hunt for an outstanding community manager to join our team, and help us support our clients in the agency market – public relations, advertising, communications, marketing, that sort of thing.

If you have solid agency experience and think you’ve got what it takes to join our team as a community manager, send an email to me, Amber Naslund, Director of Community with a bit about why. Include your experience and/or resume, but most importantly, tell me how your experience and interest plays well into a community role and why you think you’re right for it.

A bit about the position is listed below. The right candidate can be located remotely (US or Canada), and salary is commensurate with experience.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Community Manager – Agency

Responsibilities:

• Listen to and engage with the Radian6 community actively and responsively, both in relevant outpost communities and existing resident channels
• Work closely with agency-side account and sales teams to contribute subject matter expertise in support of client accounts
• Proactively participate in agency-related industry discussions when possible and appropriate to contribute expertise
• Create and contribute content to Radian6 though leadership initiatives (blogs, webinars, whitepapers, etc) on an ongoing basis
• Work with the community team to establish and refine consistent community engagement practices
• Collaborate on internal communication programs to inform and educate around social media initiatives and their broader implications
• Provide ongoing feedback to community, account, training, and support teams on agency community trends, issues, and interests
• Master the Radian6 dashboard for use in reporting, online demos, and engagement, focusing on optimal agency use
• Attend and participate in industry events as appropriate (some travel may be required)

Attributes:

• Belief in the importance of listening and engaging through social media
• Entrepreneurial, self-motivated, get-it-done attitude
• Thrives in a fast-paced, nimble work environment.
• Passion to explore new ideas, contribute critically to discussion, and build on ideas from others
• Discipline to work projects to deadlines, or build structure and process around new initiatives
• Commitment to internal communication and collaboration
• Passion for client service and connecting with people
• Curiosity and interest in how social media intersects with the business world, especially the agency sector
• A sense of humor and the ability to not take yourself too seriously

Skills:

• Outstanding written and verbal communication. Really.
• Demonstrated knowledge and experience in a communications, PR, marketing or other agency environment and understanding of agency culture.
• Sound social media strategy mindset, including committed personal experience and contributions across multiple social media channels
• Ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously, distilling necessary tasks from high-level direction
• Delivery of consistent, helpful and engaged client and prospect attention

In May this year the United Kingdom will once again fall into election fever as political parties increase their presence in all forms of media to try and win votes.  In previous elections traditional media sources were utilised to push election messages.  Billboards, newspaper stories and party political broadcasts after Eastenders were all part of raising awareness of the major parties and their agendas.  This year, the parties have a new challenge – to harness social media.

Here at 6Consulting we’re of the opinion that social media is a useful tool for campaigns, whether corporate or political.  Not only can social media reach a vast audience, it can also be done at relatively little cost, making it an efficient and effective tool if harnessed properly.  In the simplest terms, without even thinking about engagement and influence, a presence in social media makes the parties visible to those who may just change the channel when the party broadcasts come on.  If political parties do dabble in social media, we can monitor their activities and gauge sentiment towards them in real time.

While the influence of social media on this election campaign remains to be seen, we can monitor the recent level of buzz around the parties and attempt to predict a result based on their current social media presence.

Using Radian6 to do a bit of top level social media monitoring, I decided only to focus on the main three parties:

• Gordon Brown and the Labour Party
• David Cameron and the Conservative Party
• Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrat Party

The chart below shows the level of mentions of these parties and their leaders in social media from the beginning of January

Figure 1: Levels of Party Conversation Over Time from January 2010

It is clear that the Political Parties are mentioned a huge amount in social media.  There were thousands upon thousands of mentions of the parties, many relating to M.P’s recent scandals.  Yet not all of these mentions are related to the election; I only wanted to find chatter surrounding the parties when they are mentioned with the upcoming general election.  I refined my Boolean for the search and paired mentions of the parties and their leaders with the word ‘election’.  The results were reduced to a manageable level to make my prediction and can be seen in the charts below:

Figure 2: Share of Social Media Voice Between the three parties from January 2010

Figure 3: Levels of Party Election Conversation over Time from January 2010

Between the beginning of January up to the 23rd March:

• Labour dominate Election conversation with around 50% of the mentions over the monitored period. However, their mentions fluctuate greatly and although they are consistently higher than the other parties, the trend is prone to dramatic spikes suggesting conversation is unstable.
• The Conservative Party have a strong social media presence which is more consistent than Labour’s.  The largest spike occurs during the party’s conference.
• The Liberal Democrats had a smaller social media presence, yet with nearly 15,000 mentions, this is still strong.

The conversation levels are very high.  The parties command a level of conversation that many companies would wish to emulate.

Analysis of this data shows that Labour have a significantly higher level of election chatter around their party than the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.  While the Liberal Democrat election chatter remains steady with a few spikes over the monitored period, the Labour chatter remains at a higher base rate and spikes frequently.  Conservative Party conversation is relatively steady at a level between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but spikes on the 28th February.  Drilling down on the spike in Radian6 it is clear there was widespread reporting of David Cameron’s keynote speech at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton in which Mr. Cameron admitted the election would be close:

Figure 4: Radian6's River of News for 28/02/2010 Conservative Spike

The story was the highest peak in both Conservative and Labour Party election conversation.  The reason both Parties see a spike is because the articles mention both parties side by side, seeing them as the two front runners in the election race.  The Liberal Democrat election related conversation also spikes on the same day, but at a much lower level.  A word cloud from the day highlights the focus of the coverage in social media:

Figure 5: Frequently Used Words in Social Media 28/02/2010

If I were to predict the result of the General Election purely on this piece of social media analysis, I would assume that the Conservative and Labour Parties are the most popular and newsworthy of the three.  The two clearly have more social media coverage than the Liberal Democrats.  If I were a betting man I would rule out the Liberal Democrats for this particular race and put my money on the Labour Party.

In conclusion, the debate over social media and its function in election campaigns rages on.  The Daily Telegraph has recently launched a debating section of its site, in which the presence of social media and sentiment towards the main parties is tracked and updated.  Clearly the social media aspect of this election is being recognised, it could potentially alter the balance over time.  In my opinion, if the parties’ social media interaction reaches out to more people and encourages voting, then it’s nothing but a good thing!

David Barber

Data Analyst and Research Assistant

@davidbarber6c

In all our talk about measurement and analysis, you’ll find a common theme throughout: you have to have a goal before you get started. This point can’t be emphasized enough, especially in such a fast-paced realm as social media.

And yes, it’s tough to find the time to solidify exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing, but if you don’t think through to the end and carve out those reasons behind your work, you’ll suffer, and here’s why.

1. Strategy is fluid.

If you’re doing it right, your strategy for any business initiative – traditional marketing plan, lead generation strategy, etc. – is fluid and in constant review-and-adjust mode. To that end, without a goal in mind, without knowing what your end is supposed to be, how can you properly measure your work and adjust your strategy and tactics accordingly to make sure you’re still on the “right” path? How do you avoid the sidelining effects of odd numbers and unexpected results? Without a goal, you don’t avoid those sidelines, you get sucked into them.

You have to have an end point in sight at all times to allow your strategy to remain fluid while still being meaningful. Now, don’t think your end point can’t change, too, but if it does, it’s changed because you and your team thought about the big picture and what you’re trying to achieve and made a conscious decision to shift that end point to a more appropriate place.

2. Metrics are personal.

What? Metrics are personal? What am I measuring here, the success of my efforts to get my kids playing soccer? Not quite, but metrics are personal in that no single, overarching set of metrics applies to every business model or vertical. No, there will never be a silver bullet set of measurements to live by.

That shoe company down the street, with a Facebook page and a contest on its Website and a Twitter account that tweets fun trivia about shoes, may be tracking metrics like number of positive comments directed at its brand, number of brand name mentions away from brand social media outposts, or number of added members to their social media networks, all in a 30-day timeframe.

Are those metrics right for you? Well, do you have the same goals as that shoe company? Probably not. So those metrics almost invariably won’t work for your company. Metrics are only effective when they’re tailored to your goals, small and large. That fact will never change.

3. Goals clarify need.

This might be the most validating reason for setting goals at all. Choosing a goal for an initiative forces you to think through your decision before moving forward. Goals force the question “Why?” Why do we want to get involved in social media? Why do we want more brand awareness? Why are we measuring that? Some folks see this as the “So what?” part of social media strategy planning, replacing “Why?” with “So What?”

Keeping clear goals at the forefront of your mind and strategies will constantly provide clarification and validation for what you’re doing, and will help you weed out useless processes and measuring tactics that won’t work for what you’re trying to achieve. Goals will clarify what you’re actually supposed to be measuring, and measuring the right things will garner more buy-in, support, and justification for the work you’re doing than any other piece of the social media pie.

We believe heartily in the stories and qualitative pieces inherent in social media engagement, but the numbers serve only to support those more abstract, less concrete bits. Make sure you’re tracking and reporting on the right numbers and eliminating unnecessary steps and wasted time by setting well-thought-out goals and objectives before diving in.

Man, what a topic! Measuring the impact of your community on your business can sometimes be a tricky beast to tame. Each community is different, and each business may have a different purpose for measuring their community.  Before you can truly begin to measure the impact of your community, a few items need to be defined and agreed upon by your internal stakeholders.

Define Community Success

Defining what your definition of community success means is the first step in measuring your community impact. How you measure community impact largely depends on how you want to define what a “successful” community means for your business. For some, having a large community is important, while others may see a small but tight-knit community as the most valuable to their business. Some communities will come together around support and training topics, while others may center themselves around your philanthropic and local community projects. The definitions of success for these communities may vary greatly, so it’s important to have a solid definition of what you consider to be a successful community.

Combining Metrics

Chances are, there are metrics and KPIs in place across all departments of your business. Metrics like leads generated, sales closed, support calls answered, inquiries received, and number of website visitors within a set timeframe are all commonly-measured metrics, and ones that can be used to help measure your community impact. In our support and training case, support calls answered or tickets opened/closed may be two metrics that you can include to give a bigger picture of how your community is impacting your business. For our philanthropic community, inquiries received and website visitor metrics may be more appropriate to include in your measurement reports.

Benchmarking

Before you go wild and crazy with measuring community impact, define the metrics you’ll use and set benchmarks for each of those metrics.  Look at the metrics you’re going to tie in from your current measurement practices, and then look at the metrics that you’ll be introducing as new success metrics for your community.  Three big measurement areas are; cost savings, leads, conversions and sales, and awareness, attention and reach. We cover these in our March eBook in case you’d like to dig deeper.

Once you have your metrics defined, set your benchmarks and make sure everyone on your team is clear what they are. Start measuring your community impact from there.

Set SMART Goals

SMART goals. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely goals are hands-down the best, yet often hardest, to set. For each metric you want to measure, look at your benchmark and come up with SMART goals which you will use to measure against as time progresses. Are you looking for a 5% increase in inquiries received that reference your community and philanthropic projects throughout the year? Perhaps you’re looking to reduce call center costs by enabling your customers to reach out online, or help each other by sharing learnings and solutions to commonly-occurring questions or problems. Whatever your goals are, make sure they have parameters and timelines.

Tying it all Together

So far you’ve created your definition of what a successful community looks like to your business, discovered which departments your community impacts, looked at how they currently measure success, lined up your measurement plan to tie in with those metrics, set a base level through benchmarking, and created SMART community goals.

Great, now what?

Put your measurement plan into action. Take time, whether it’s weekly or monthly, to sit aside and review both your metrics and goals, as well as the metrics your business already measures.

If your community ties in closely with your customer service department, look at how many cases opened/closed took place within the time period you’re measuring.  Did your community come to the rescue of a fellow member and help them solve something with minimal/no involvement from your customer support team? If so, look at what the value of a customer support rep is for an hour, or a day, and show how much money your community just helped you save.

If part of your successful community includes lead generation, look at how many leads generated are directly attributed to your community. Did a member recommend you to a colleague? Are there notes in your CRM indicating the source of a lead? Do you have these segmented and tracked in your monitoring solution? Did any leads that came from your community close this month? Leads generated and sales closed are wonderful numbers to show how your community is helping to grow your business.

When measuring your community impact it’s important to tie together your existing metrics and measurement practices with the ones you’re establishing that focus exclusively on your community. The goal is to get a big picture of how your community ties in with your business and helps you achieve your goals, NOT to show how great your community is in a silo.

There are many ways of measuring community impact, and this blog post doesn’t cover them all! Share your stories in the comments.

Next up in our metrics series: content performance metrics. As with putting into practice any sort of measurement, you need to know what your purpose is before diving in. What are your goals for your content? For your Website? For your blog? For your Web events? You must establish what you’re trying to achieve for each content avenue before selecting metrics for measurement, and you must be able to glean insights from the data you gather to make it valuable.

With all that being said, here are some metrics to consider for tracking the performance of your Website, blog, and educational content.

1. Views

One of the most fundamental starting points for measuring the performance of your content is looking at how many views or hits it receives. The pages that are viewed or landed on most often on your Website can give you clues into what people are searching for and what information they find valuable. On the other hand, tracking views can also tell you what pages are under-performing. For example, if your Product Details page is receiving few hits, you can infer that the content on that page needs tweaking or that people are having a hard time finding it. There’s a good chance you’ll also see a theme in what people want to read on your blog (if you have one) based on which posts get the most hits. Views are simple things, but they’re a foundational starting point for measurement.

2. Comments/Feedback

Comments are a great way to track response to your content, and they offer you insight into what your community is interested in learning more about, what questions they have, and where they believe you, as an organization, can and do fill in the knowledge gaps. If you find that a specific topic you’ve blogged about gets a significant number of questions in the comments, those questions can directly impact future content you produce surrounding that topic, and tell you what’s missing in the greater industry picture. Search for the title of your blog posts, brand name, or blog post topics to see if the conversation has traveled away from your homebase. And, of course, pay attention to and even ask for direct contact and feedback — that’s the most telling sign of whether your content is hitting home or missing the mark.

3.Clicks/Downloads

If you’re producing downloadable content, you need to be tracking clicks and downloads, it’s that simple. On-click event coding is easy to insert in the links to those ebooks and whitepapers you’re offering your community, and should be done for every piece of downloadable content you publish. While this metric doesn’t stand solidly on its own, it’s a great supplemental piece to help you hone in on trends in your community’s informational needs and participation with you, and will also tell you if people find the resources you’re providing valuable enough to download.

4. Length of Visits

The length of time someone spends (or doesn’t spend) with your content can be a strong indicator of your content’s success or shortcomings. Is your content answering as many questions as possible for visitors about your products, services, or industry? Are visitors clicking through to other pages around your site, or are they stopping by and then leaving quickly? The more information your content provides clearly and concisely, the more people will understand what your company is about and be able relate it to their needs. That understanding can be identified as an actual visit, instead of a bounce; clicks through to other pieces of your Website can also add to the time someone spends on it and identify their interest in your service or product.

5. Registrations/Subscriptions

As mentioned in our post giving you 10 key awareness metrics to track, subscriptions are a sign people are interested in what your organization has to say, and they’re paying attention to it. Subscriptions are also a sign that people find value in the content you’re producing to a degree that they want to receive it regularly. Subscriptions, as well as repeat event registrations and sign-ups, are a sign that people not only value your company but they also find value in your content.

6. Shares

If your content is hitting home with your community, there’s a good chance individuals are sharing it with their colleagues, teams, and networks. For instance, say you received a great email newsletter today from a vendor that you know a decent portion of your Twitter network would benefit from seeing. When you share that newsletter –via the “Share This on Twitter” button at the bottom of it — that share is logged, and it tells the vendor they’ve said something you find valuable to share with others. By watching that newsletter get passed around, the vendor can identify the types of people who see value in its content and tie those insights back to goals and objectives for future content initiatives.

7. Inbound Links

Inbound links are a direct indicator that people are reading and thinking about your content and either find value in it or find something contentious about it that makes them want to fight back. Not only do inbound links keep you consistently aware of who is talking about you, but they also give you additional context to round out future content and provide you with clearly defined profiles of the people and organizations that are paying attention to you.

8. Unique and Repeat Visits

Tracking unique and repeat visits can tell you: a) whether the efforts you’ve put forth in your various marketing initiatives are having a positive impact (i.e., driving traffic to your Website), and b) whether your content is valuable enough to bring people back for more. The value piece of this puzzle is relative to what you’re trying to achieve. Do you want to establish your organization and the people within it as thought leaders by providing useful educational resources? Then watch to see if you receive repeat visits from people on your blog and resource pages, and if the number of repeat visitors is increasing over time.

9. Clarity of Your Message

This one might seem a little far out, but bear with me. If your content is truly effective, people will be able to talk about your brand message, identity, and unique values with clarity and consistency, without your needing to speak up. How do you track that? By listening to what people are saying about your brand name. Yes, this is more of a qualitative metric, but it’s an important one to keep your eye on. Place the conversations others are having about you up against your own brand messaging and goals to see just how clear your message is when it’s being stewarded by others. If you’ve hit the nail on the head, your community is delivering your message as clearly as you are.

10. Conversions

While conversions are definitely a strong sales metric, they can also tell you how well or poorly your content channels are performing. If you’re Website is conveying clear messaging and is well constructed, visitors will be able to march right through your sitemap to get all the information they need and head straight to the purchasing or the contact section of your site to begin the sales process. Along with your Website, the additional content you create — email newsletter, Web events, instructional videos, etc. — should account for a chunk of your sales conversions.

You might think that these content metrics look mighty similar to engagement metrics, and you’d be right in thinking that. The truth is that engagement is strongly tied to content; the more people find value in what you’re saying — on your Website, in your resource content, during your Web events — the more they will choose to interact with you.

One of the most important things to remember is that the more your community talks with you, the more insight you can glean from them to directly impact your future content initiatives. Paying attention to how they interact with you now and how their interactive behavior changes over time will help you adjust smoothly to continually provide information and content they’re looking for and remain on their radar.

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Update to the Brian Solis Webinar: The date for this Webinar has been changed to Friday, April 2nd, at 10am PST/1pm EST. If you’ve already registered for this event, please change the date in your calendar. If not, you can register right here.

Jessica Watson is your typical 16-year-old. She loves the beach, reading, cooking, and sailing. Lots of sailing. In fact, Jessica is currently on schedule to break the record for the world’s youngest person to sail by herself, unassisted, around the world, in her 34-foot yacht named “Ella’s Pink Lady”.

Her story is an astounding one, not only because of what it’s made of, but also because of how she’s chosen to tell it. In typical 21st-century-teenager fashion, Jessica – and her family and brand managers – are using multiple social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and her blog, to keep the world updated on her progress and color in the details of her incredible undertaking.

Unsurprisingly, the response to Jessica’s journey has been massive and polarized; people either commend her for working toward such a huge achievement or tell her she’s too young to be hitting the seas alone. No sooner had she started her trip than her supporters and detractors came out in droves, leaving hundreds of comments, both positive and negative, on her blog and in other various spots around the Web. While the majority of the comments left for Jessica cheered her on, her parents understood that not all of the feedback would be so supportive, and they, along with Jessica’s management, wanted a 360-degree view of what was being said about her.

To manage the flood of commentary and keep on top of conversation, Team Jessica – which includes digital agency d.tail Noisemakers (in partnership with Tonto Digital and Elixir Digital) – recruited Radian6’s Australian outlet, Social2CRM, to create a monitoring strategy they could live by for the duration of Jessica’s trip. By thoroughly monitoring the conversations about Jessica, her management and family are able to make informed decisions about when, where, and how to respond, and where Jessica should respond, as well.

“Google Alerts are great, but we needed a better media monitoring tool to thoroughly keep track of posts and understand more about the post than simply where it came from and the content,” said Jessica Murphy of d.tail Noisemakers. “Every week we export reports reflecting the number of posts, sentiment, media type, trending topics, etcetera, from Radian6, and we add our own social media analytics and insights to deliver the report’s to JW’s management and her family.”

In addition, if any posts stand out during a given week, the folks at d.tail Noisemakers forward them on to Jessica’s management to make them aware of potential issues.

While this tack sounds fairly typical of your modern brand management use case, the added depth to Jessica’s story is that her managers and family use these media platforms and the monitoring strategy to encourage her as she completes this, by definition, lonely voyage. Her team is also monitoring the stories coming from mass media outlets, and continually making sure that she receives only information most relevant to her since her bandwidth is so limited.

The value of monitoring and managing brand reputation is largely magnified when the processes are applied to a “brand” inadvertently created by a young girl taking on the epic task of sailing around the world by herself. Via their listening and monitoring strategies, Jessica’s family and management have been able to gain perspective on how people perceive Jessica and the goal she’s aiming to achieve, jump in to correct misperceptions and uninformed commentary, and make sure that the odd inappropriate comment is taken care of before it turns into something bigger. Because of the reports she receives, Jessica is able to respond directly to comments and feedback, and build relationships with those interested in her story by answering their questions and recognizing their support.

As of Tuesday, March 16th, Jessica had been sailing for 150 days and had just passed the 17,000-nautical-mile mark of her 23,000-nautical mile journey. With approximately 6,000 nautical miles left, Jessica is poised to wrap up her trip at her starting port of Sydney, Australia soon and will be writing a book about her journey upon her return.

Content for this story contributed by Leena Wood, Business Development Director for Social2CRM Ltd., in Sydney, Australia. Social2CRM is a social media analytics & social CRM strategy company and main reseller partner for Radian6 that provides social media analytics tools, support, and training to the Australia and New Zealand markets.

I think it’s fitting that I’m writing this post from SXSW.  I’ve done a lot of chatting over the past week, have attended a few panels, and have finally matched faces with names for many people I know online.

From a business perspective, how do we quantify the value of my time here at SXSW?

Adding a Bit of Color

There’s a lot of chatter about fuzzy metrics – those soft metrics, like the value of a conversation at a conference – that have value, but perhaps one value that is harder to define in a business sense.

Thinking of your measurement strategy as a picture, the hard metrics are the outlines: the big, black lines that form the overall picture and define what you’re really looking at.

The fuzzy metrics add color. Things like conversations at conferences, a shared meal, a round of golf or a few quips exchanged via Twitter – those are the items that add color and depth to your picture.

Showing share of conversation for your brand vs. your competitors is an important hard metric to track, but how do you break that share of conversation out to show the exact value one of those conversations has for your business?  Do you weigh conversations with people who are influential differently than conversations with people who have less of a direct tie to your business?

Including hard metrics in your measurement is necessary, and is a key way that many marketing, PR, or social media teams justify their existence to their C-suite.  But including the soft or fuzzy metrics are equally as valuable, especially as time moves forward and the soft metrics flow into the hard metrics. More often than not, the soft metrics give background, and are key indicators at the very start of trends or changes in your results.

Painting your Picture

My role as a Community Manager puts me on the very long tail of the sales cycle.  My job isn’t a lead generation job, but it is sometimes part of what my job entails.  My focus, though, is firmly in the land of fuzzy metrics.  I focus on the handshakes, the “Hello”s, the @ messages on Twitter, and the ability to connect either online or offline to provide information, solve a problem, or sometimes just show that there is a human on the other end of the line.

I may be on the long tail of the sales cycle, but the fuzzy metrics of how I connect with people still do matter in a very real way. They show how my role fits into our company in terms of helping awareness, driving sales, or even reducing customer support costs (to name a few). That handshake could be the start of a fruitful business relationship, so including fuzzy metrics in your measurement strategy often shows trends that the hard metrics only pick up after they’ve begun.

Framing your Artwork

As time passes, some of those handshakes or rounds of golf will turn into website hits or product inquiries.  Some of those inquiries or visits will turn into partnerships or sales, and that’s where things get interesting.

One of the most important things you can do is tie your measurement systems together, not necessarily through integrated systems (though that does help), but by correlating activities and trends to your metrics, and trying to clearly define and report on causation where applicable.

For example, if a salesperson notes that the person they’re speaking with first heard of your company from a conversation with a marketing rep at an industry event, that’s important to tie back into your measurement reports. Suddenly, those handshakes take on a different meaning, and if you’re trying to get buy-in from your C-suite, you have a few more proof points to rely on.

I’m sure you all have plenty of examples of how the fuzzy metrics have impacted your business. The comments are yours to share your stories.

Well, folks, it’s that time again! Time for another Radian6 Webinar, and we’re so excited about this one. Brian Solis, co-author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and principal of FutureWorks digital agency, will be joining us Friday, April 2nd, to chat about the core concepts in his newest book, Engage!.

Being a business owner himself, Brian approaches engagement and brand sustainability on the social Web from a standpoint of thorough accountability and depth of meaning. He emphasizes the responsibility and privilege businesses have to connect with and bring value to those who’ve established themselves in the online social space through social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. In turn, for a business to continue creating value for itself and its community, internal players must have the proper guidance to know exactly what it is they’re doing on the social Web, how they need to measure those initiatives, and how to report that information back to the people they work with.

In Engage!, Brian breaks down why businesses should get involved on the social Web and also provides the information you need to get started engaging in the right places and fostering the relationships you build so they become impactful to your organization.

So listen in as we talk with Brian next week, and if you have any questions for Brian beforehand, feel free to leave them in the comments and we’ll be sure to ask them during the Webinar. Calendar details and the registration link are below. We hope you can join us!

When: Friday, April 2nd
Time: 10am PDT/1pm EDT
Register: Engage With Brian Solis

Photo courtesy of affiliatesummit.

Last week we drilled down into engagement metrics, so this week let’s take a look at awareness and reach. The reach of your brand is, essentially, a measure of the impression your brand is making online: how far it’s moved across the Web and how many eyes, ears, and mouths are seeing, hearing, and talking about it.

Now, how do you measure reach? It might seem a little fuzzy at first, but these few metrics can provide a foothold in the practice of measuring how far your brand extends — and *how* it extends — out there on the Web.

1. Potential Reach

The most basic of all awareness metrics, looking at the numbers of fans, followers, or “eyeballs” is a pretty fundamental concept. But the more accurate way to look at numbers like this is as *potential* reach, as you’ll never have all of those people paying attention to you simultaneously. Take a look at other elements like peak usage time for specific sites and marry awareness metrics with actual engagement activity to get a closer ratio of potential vs. actual reach at any one time.

2. Mentions Per Time Period

The online equivalent of “impressions”, looking simply at how many times your brand is talked about online during a given time period can give you a sense of overall awareness and chatter. It can be interesting to segment this category of data overall, too, through lenses like “mentions by media type”, to see whether blogs or forums or mainstream media are carrying the bulk of conversation about your brand. And line up this metric with your targeted campaigns or engagement efforts, and get a sense of whether your work drives those numbers up, down, or not at all.

3. Inbound Links

The web analytics standby, inbound links are a solid indicator of the people that are not only aware of you, but are telling other people that they should be aware of you, too. Want to know where in social media you should be spending your time? Look at the sites and media types where the inbound links live to get a sense of the types of media that are driving consistent attention for your brand. And to get some insight into how people refer to you and think of you, pay attention to the anchor text folks use when they create those links, and see if they’re using the terminology to describe your work that you hope they are.

4. Share of Conversation

Share of Voice is a familiar concept, looking at how much you’re mentioned or covered in comparison to, say, the competition. but Share of Conversation measures something a bit more helpful: how often you or your company are mentioned in context of the conversations that are most relevant to you. In other words, if you want to be a leading document management company, how often are folks talking about you when they’re talking about their document management needs? For a bit more detail about how to calculate and measure Share of Conversation, read Marcel Lebrun’s post.

5. Subscribers to Content

Related to potential reach, number of subscriptions can function as both an awareness and an engagement metric. Whether you’re talking email subscribers, blog subscribers, or even subscribers to your print publication, subscriptions represent conscious interest in your content and a focused group of potential reach for that media. And while you often depend on provided “reach” or impression numbers given to you by third parties for advertising placements or the like, subscribers is a number that’s directly attributable to your own content and impact.

6. Referral and Recommendation Ratio

This metric really ends up in the camp of engagement, too, as well as sales. But from an awareness point of view, it can be valuable when looking at the value of increased awareness over time, and whether that correlates with a consistent proportion of recommendations or referrals in and among the other mentions. If you can successfully increase the ratio of direct brand recommendations as an overall share of reach and awareness, you’ll better make a case for designing efforts to reach larger audiences.

7. Brand Recognition

Sometimes asking people if they know about you still works. That can be an informal straw poll on larger social networks, or a more structured survey of a broader audience through something like a market research firm. Sometimes called recall, the idea here is looking at everything from whether people can and do name your brand inside of a relevant market category, or in association with other relevant ideas or concepts. It can be an interesting broad-brush look at whether you’re present in people’s minds in the ways that matter to you.

8. Brand-Specific Searches

Take a look at your analytics traffic for your website, and see what people are typing into search when they’re referred to you. Are they searching for general industry terms, like “car repair shop in Austin”, or are they specifically searching for “Bob’s Repair Shop Austin”? Look at the ratio to brand searches vs. keyword searches and see how that ratio changes over time. Keyword searches represent a broader need, while brand-specific searches are an indicator that you’re being sought out specifically.

9. Sentiment Trends

There’s a lot of talk about sentiment and what it can or can’t tell you. What we at Radian6 chat a lot about is the value of sentiment as a trend metric, looking at the volume and ratio increase, decrease, or stagnation over a broader time period. While impressions can tell you volume of mentions, coupling them with sentiment trends can tell you whether the brand impression overall is favorable or not. Want to get really granular? Start dissecting, say, the positive sentiment segment and look at the makeup. Are they mostly compliments? Recommendations? Nice words about your staff?

10. Content Resonance

Also firmly with a foot in the engagement camp, watching how content gets shared across the web will also certainly point you toward how many people are seeing what you’re up to. Along with first level shares and spread of your content – the tweets, subscription impressions, website hits – you can also dig into the notion of secondary reach. That means looking at who in your network reshared and passed along your content: retweets, reblogs, shares, or inbound links from spinoff content. Add a time series layer to that – how long the shares and reshares continue to trickle out to the web – and you’ll start seeing the kinds of content that reverberate well.

As we talked about in the post about 10 Key Engagement Metrics to Track, single metrics on their own aren’t really worth much. The real trick is to connect the dots and tie them together so that you can see how several measurements, in tandem, point to progress toward your business goals.

So what are you tracking that indicates reach and awareness in your world? How are you using those measurements to correlate with your sales and engagement data? Would love to hear from you in the comments.

The social phone. It seems like a fairly simple concept, right? That’s essentially what a phone is, a tool or channel that allows people to connect to one another. We look at social media as the social phone – it’s the place where people can “call up” the brands and companies they want to talk to, to chat customer service and much, much more. And right now, it’s the responsibility of brands and companies to answer the social phone and talk with their customers over the channels they choose to use to communicate.

The good folks at The Social Customer put together a comprehensive ebook that hones in on the essence of customer service and the idea of answering the social phone, and we’re glad we could be a part of its creation. Our VP of Marketing, David Alston, helped round out this valuable conversation, which also touched on concepts like:

• The value of customer communities, for both customers and organizations.
• The very real opportunity of monetizing a branded community.
• Being available to your customers via their channels of choice.
• Aligning your organization to encourage customer feedback and integrate that feedback into future product and service plans.
• The importance of solidifying the foundation of customer service in your organization before diving into social media.

This ebook is filled with use cases and advice from some of the social media, customer service, and CRM industries’ most valuable players. We recommend you download it and take a read through to see how the growing collaborative relationships between businesses and customers are shifting the practice of customer service into high definition.

As you probably know by now, March is all about social media measurement and analysis here on the Radian6 blog. We’re here to help get you thinking about which metrics are a fit for your particular goals and objectives, and get you started measuring them to produce meaningful insights. So we pulled together an ebook of epic proportions for you to download that covers the basics of getting started measuring your social media programs.

We’ve broken down each chapter by metric type, with the first chapter providing some context and caveats for you to consider before diving into the meat of this ebook.

The second chapter covers metrics for establishing the awareness, attention, and reach of your brand by breaking down what each particular metric really means, giving you and idea of which pieces of the social media pie fall under the umbrella of those metrics, and offering up a step-by-step process as to how to measure each.

Chapters 3 and 4 follow that same format and cover metrics for leads, conversions, sales, and cost savings. In February’s ebook, we also provided a list of metrics you can refer to, to measure the impact of your community building endeavors, and we’ll be tackling that topic down the line, as well.

If you’ve had a tough time figuring out exactly how to track and measure your social media efforts, please don’t hesitate to grab this ebook, and let us know if it helps you find your balance a bit. And please, feel free to ask us any questions you’ve got – we’re here to help!

The Television and the Internet . Two of the most important and influential inventions of the last century.  Whether you condone their influence on today’s culture or not, their ubiquitous nature cannot be denied.  Both offer tantalising opportunities for marketing departments of companies of all sizes.  According to the National Media Museum TV advertising began in Britain when, on the 22nd September 1955, Gibbs Sr advertised its toothpaste on ITV which had began broadcasting as competition to the BBC (http://bit.ly/ce3Lrh).  Things have changed slightly since then!

It is unlikely anyone could have predicted the growth in importance of a successful TV marketing campaign.  Some embed themselves into the public consciousness and others are forgotten quickly.  Here I want to assess whether high profile TV marketing campaigns have an affect on a company’s online presence by conducting a bit of social media research myself.

Racking my brain for TV adverts, the first that popped into my head was GoCompare’s.  Featuring tenor Gio Compario singing a catchy, memorable tune, the advert was stuck in my head following the previous night’s TV consumption.  This was my starting point.  I thought up some other insurance companies which have caught my attention recently.  The most obvious competitor in my head was CompareTheMarket.com’s charming meerkat adverts.  Esure’s Michael Winner adverts also popped up in my thoughts (I must have car insurance on my mind!).  I also threw Moonpig.com, the personalised card service, in there for a bit of variety.

I was interested to see if there was increased conversation about a brand when their TV campaigns were active, and also if a new TV advert would be discussed in social media.  Using Radian6 I entered the brand names of the companies to see how frequently they had been mentioned since January and got the following results:

Figure 1 - Share Of Voice in Social Media

From this top level search it would appear that Esure enjoys the lion’s share of social media coverage.  But I am interested in finding spikes in conversation, and linking these to TV marketing campaigns to assess their influence.

The chart below visualises the above information into conversation level trends over the monitoring period, through this we can analyse spikes in conversation, perhaps caused by influential adverts.

Figure 2 - Mentions in social media from January

From a first glance it is obvious there were two large spikes in social media conversation concerning two of these companies.  They are:

• Esure.com on the 11th February with 213 mentions
• CompareTheMarket.com on the 1st March with 214 mentions

Can these large spikes be attributed directly to the marketing campaigns of these companies?  In short, no and yes.

Esure.com’s spike on the 11th February was not caused by its TV adverts.  By drilling down on the spike in Radian6 I discovered that the spike is caused by the spread of news that Esure is parting company with Lloyd’s Banking Group, it’s majority shareholder.  While many mainstream news articles referenced Michael Winner’s “Calm down dear” catchphrase in their reporting, the news was not a result of the TV campaign.

CompareTheMarket’com’s spike, however, is directly attributed to their effective Aleksandr Orlov the Meerkat campaign.  The day’s social media posts relate to news that the advert, featuring the aristocratic Russian Meerkat, has been nominated for an award.  This social media conversation directly relates to the TV campaigns, and is also extremely positive in sentiment.  A word cloud of the day’s posts highlight that CompareTheMarket.com’s conversation was surrounding its marketing campaign:

Figure 3 - CompareTheMarket's March Spike Keywords

Looking at CompareTheMarket.com’s trend across January, the increase in mentions at the start of the year caught my eye.

The 4th January saw a spike in CompareTheMarket.com conversation in social media.  The day saw the release of a new advert featuring the Meerkat character.  This sparked Tweets by fans of the advert, for example

• “I actually love the CompareTheMarket.com advert. Simples!” by @paradiseisdying
• “been waiting for that comparethemarket.com advert for so long” by @haitherdalee
• “Love the new comparethemeerkat.com ad!!!” by @kaneknight
• “Cant believe I just enjoyed the latest comparethemarket.com ad with the meerkats” by @louisebinns

From this basic bit of social media research I have found that CompareTheMarket.com’s tv adverts have had an affect on their level of mentions in social media.  Esure’s dominance of the share of voice is actually down to their business dealings rather than any active tv campaign they may have running.

Unfortunately for GoCompare.com, their largest spike on the 13th January with 71 posts is linked with their TV marketing, but for the wrong reasons.  According to Tweets and Blog posts, their adverts have been voted the most annoying of 2009.  Oh dear!  They may take consolation in that at least their ads were well discussed in social media, which is more than can be said for Moonpig and Esure.com!

One of the biggest hurdles to jump in integrating social media into a business is figuring out the most cost-effective and functional way to scale its use. As your organization grows and continues to weave social media into its processes, it will be critical to establish a workflow that extends across departments while still allowing your teams to engage efficiently.

The need for a tool that helps businesses scale and simultaneously streamline their social media working processes is growing by leaps and bounds, which is why we are thrilled to announce the release of our upcoming product, the Radian6 Engagement Console.

Radian6′s new Engagement Console is a desktop application that:

• Extends social media monitoring, listening, and engagement to every desktop within your company.
• Is a complete social Web client that lets you listen to all media types, including blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn Answers, Facebook fan pages & public discussion groups, as well as online mainstream news sites.
• Allows real-time collaboration among your team members and one-click-workflow assignment of posts enabling faster and more cost effective engagement.
• Ties into the full power of Radian6, so your teams can channel the right conversations to the right people within your enterprise.
• Records all interactions in Radian6 for comprehensive operational reporting, and conversation analysis and reporting.

The Engagement Console is outfitted with a number of features to help you organize and maximize social media monitoring and engagement throughout your department and company.

Comprehensive Listening Coverage

Customize a listening grid by breaking out your conversation stacks by broad or specific topics, tagged customer lists, or even user assignment. Stacks for your Radian6 topic profile can be separated out by media type to keep you in the loop on exactly where people are talking about your brand or area of expertise.

Fast-Moving, Streamlined Workflow

Open up the Workflow function next to your Radian6 conversation stacks to tag, assign, and route posts to team members, and watch them respond in real time. Pull up a stack of your own assignments and start engaging on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and conversation threads right from the Engagement Console. For even more efficiency, create one-click workflow buttons that assign priority, status, sentiment, and user assignment to multiple posts all at once.

All the conversations you choose to participate in – and the ensuing engagement between your team and external constituents – will be recorded for reference. Review how your team handled the conversation, any notes they provided, and see how your interaction impacted and rippled through the larger business community.

Multi-Network Integration and Social Profile Viewing

Keep pace with all the activity happening around multiple Twitter accounts as well as your Facebook account with the Engagement Console. Tweet, reply, retweet, and send direct messages, shuffle through user profiles, and follow new contacts right from the platform. For added ease of use, click on the Auto-Shorten URL function.

Follow the activity on Facebook by observing and responding to status updates, wall posts, comments, and “likes”. Also view news feeds for your Facebook friends, see new photos or videos as they’re being uploaded, and leave your own comments and status updates without leaving the Console.

For a more well-rounded and contextual look at the people in your community, click on the name of a particular user to check out their comprehensive social profile, including where they can be found online and a history of interaction, notes you’ve made, and conversations you’ve had with them.

Reporting and Analysis

Within your Radian6 stack, take a look at the post volume for your particular topic profile with the built-in, at-a-glance time series graph. Click through to access the Radian6 dashboard to review and analyze metrics, segment and filter your data for micro-level analysis, and generate reports for your department and management teams.

Want More?

The Engagement Console is currently being previewed and will be available to Radian6 users in April 2010.

If you head on over to our Preview page, you’ll see a form you can fill out to let us know you’re interested in the Engagement Console. We’ll keep you in the loop as things progress and let you know exactly when it launches in April.

We’re excited about this announcement and what the Engagement Console will potentially do to advance the cause of listening and engaging within the enterprise. Have initial questions? Please let us know in the comments!

Ah, engagement. That sticky word that gets discussed an awful lot in context of social media conversations. But how, exactly, do you look at engagement and keep tabs on the factors that drive it?

While no single metric alone is going to be a solid indicator of how engaged your community or customers are, there are a few things you can look at that help guide you toward the conversations and interactions to pay attention to for deeper analysis. Here’s our take on a few of the engagement metrics to watch for.

1. Comments

One of the most popular ways of looking at engagement is how active the discussion is on any one piece of content or post. The quality and value of comments is another discussion altogether, but looking at the spark of conversation ignited by a post can be an interesting indicator of whether folks are listening, and that they’re compelled to speak up and respond.

2. Unique commenters

Some communities are incredibly tight knit or niche, which means that you might have fewer people contributing to the overall dialogue (think the 80/20 rule here). But at a high level, looking at an increase in unique commenters over time can signal not just that you’re reaching more eyes and ears, but that your work is compelling more and more people to emerge and discuss, rather than just a core contingent of fans. After all, the potential rabid fans must first make themselves known.

3. Thread size

Forums are still alive and well, especially in some tech, telco and automotive sectors (to name a few). And if you’ve got a community where you’re posting discussion questions or even FAQs and support items, looking at the length and breadth of the threaded discussion that follows can not only show you how invested your members are, but whether the discussions are proving useful and impactful for them.

4. Time with Content

Some engagement can actually be passive, meaning that the people reading or interacting with the content might be very interested, but quiet. Forrester explains on their Groundswell technographics ladder that there are people in this camp. Sometimes, they might even take your content or ideas as inspiration to create something of their own, and may not say so directly. Sometimes, looking at how long people spend perusing your content or the community discussions can indicate deep interest, even if it isn’t verbalized.

5. Content Downloads

Another popular way of assuming engagement, downloads of content like whitepapers, ebooks, or even blog posts can indicate interest in the subject matter. It’s a little looser in implication since it’s harder to track what happens AFTER the content download without doing some follow up. Are they actually getting around to reading the content and, even better, doing something with it? But looking at downloads can be a great leading indicator of engagement around a topic or subject.

6. Subscriptions

Folks signing up to your blog or newsletter or publication indicates, plain and simple, that they’re interested in what you have to say. And while true engagement is often looked at as something more interactive, subscriptions are the door opener to bring someone into the fold, and give you and them more opportunity to converse, discuss, and iterate on the content and subjects themselves.

7. Content Sharing

Another leading indicator that someone cares about what you’re doing? They tell someone else. Retweets, Stumbles, bookmarks on Delicious, even emails or blog posts. And whether or not they comment actively themselves on a regular basis, they’re demonstrating their perception of value in the material by being willing to share it along to their network. Another interesting look at this kind of statistic: how many of the shares come complete with additional positive commentary (vs. shares that say “ugh, did you SEE this piece of junk?”).

8. Suggestions/Feedback/Comments

If your community is well engaged, they’re going to invest their time and brain power in guiding you toward business improvements. Things like suggestions, product improvement ideas, innovation forums like IdeaStorm, or voting and commenting on proposed ideas can all indicate a vested interest on behalf of the people you’re trying to reach. If they care about what you’re doing and how, you have a great opportunity to line up your efforts better with the needs of the people that drive your work.

9. Spinoff Content

As I alluded to with #4, sometimes folks engage with your content or company by carrying those ideas elsewhere and applying them to expanded ideas. Sometimes that can come in the form of spinoff content, which you can often identify through inbound links, as folks can often link back to the content that originally sparked their idea. If they don’t, listening to topics similar to those you’re discussing can help unearth spinoff content.

10. Recommendations

Recommendations and endorsements sort of have a foot in both the sales metric and engagement metric camp, so we’ll talk more about the sales side in a couple of weeks. But posts and comments that recommend your business to others can be a strong indicator of that person’s connection and level of commitment to you. This is how you start to find those undiscovered evangelists and fans, and empower them with more information and access to act as your ambassador.

Remember about engagement: The metrics above are indicators, not guarantees. The hypothesis here is that by interacting with content or people on a more obvious and consistent basis, the individual is demonstrating a more committed interest in what you’re saying or doing. What you need to understand for yourself is what engagement means to you, in context of what you’re trying to achieve through same.

That  means the real value is in tying any or all of the above metrics into other, more specific measurements that indicate positive progress toward business goals. Correlating comments with increased email subscriptions. Lining up an increase in content downloads with an increase in leads, and better yet, conversion rates for those leads. You can also make a case that anything related to sales could be considered an engagement metric: leads, referrals, sales themselves. We’ll tackle those in a different metrics post later in the month.

And the Ultimate Engagement Metric is still the sale itself. All of these indicators above are designed to help increase the likelihood that someone will pay more attention to you, more often, and eventually buy from you. Let’s face it, we don’t say “yay, we got more comments!” and stop there. We want more comments, because that indicates that we have people’s attention. Attention is currency. More focused  and persistent attention increases the odds that when someone needs to buy what we have, they’ll look to us.

We’ll talk more next week about the top metrics for tracking awareness and reach. In the meantime, when you track engagement, what are you looking for? The comments are open, and we’re waiting to hear from you.

Imagine for a second that you are the head of marketing for your company and are considering taking the first steps into the wonderful (and often mysterious) world of social media. You’ve heard all about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the bevy of other tools available to you, but you’re not sure which one makes the most sense for your business. What do you do? Well, hopefully for all involved you don’t turn to the “young” person within your department just because they are young. No, chances are good you will either pull some people together internally for a discussion or turn to your agency (assuming you’re using one).

So you’ve turned to your agency and asked them to help you understand how they leverage social media. What is the first thing they do? Well, they probably wow you with a lot of interesting case studies and statistics demonstrating the power of the tools. It’s at this moment you realize you aren’t Dell, Comcast or Southwest Airlines. What can you do to get the train back on track?

You would be wise to suggest to the agency (hopefully they’ve suggested it themselves) that they do some sort of benchmarking on your behalf. Benchmarking is a critical first step in any program. Whether it’s doing content analysis or surveys, you need to understand where the starting line is for your organization.

Beth Harte wrote a post last year in which she outlined the seven holy grails of PR. One of those holy grails was researched benchmarks. PR, social media, marketing–it almost doesn’t matter. Researched benchmarks are a critical first step toward the success of any campaign.

With that in mind, what are some things you can benchmark when starting your social media campaign?

1. Share of conversation – My friend David Alston, and Radian6’s VP of Marketing, would likely tell you that social media isn’t all about the eyeballs. I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment, but would say that gauging share of conversation is helpful from at least a brand awareness perspective.
2. Where conversations are happening – Before you launch headlong into Twitter, it would be helpful to know if your customers are actually there.
3. Core messaging – Yes, social media isn’t all about pushing core messaging. However, it will be helpful to know what people are saying in reference to your brand. Implicit in that is what, specifically, is driving conversation.
4. Who is influential – Everyone, and every industry has their own definition on who is influential. Be sure to define, through listening or whatever other means, who is influential in your space before you get started.
5. Search – If you didn’t know this already, search and social media are inextricably linked. There are plenty of free tools that will show you what people are searching for. What are the key terms people are using? What is on the first page of Google results? Is your brand there?
6. Web analytics – Similar to search, what shows up on your Web site is equally critical to what’s being said in social media. Know how many unique visitors you have, what the referring sites are and percentage of new vs. returning visitors.

These are just six things that I would recommend you benchmark, but obviously you want to come up with researched benchmarks that make sense for your campaign. What other metrics have you researched? What’s worked well? What hasn’t? Looking forward to hearing your point of view.

Chuck Hemann, a 2010 Society for New Communications Research Fellow, is currently a social media associate for WCG, a global media services company focused on the corporate and product marketing and communications needs of leading healthcare companies. You can follow Chuck on Twitter.

This year’s Oscars have been an active topic on social networks even before the nominees were announced on February 2nd. With high-profile nominees such as Avatar and Meryl Streep up against breakout contenders such as The Hurt Locker and Gabourey Sidibe, there is no shortage of opinion and posts.

MSN.com has created a destination for fans interested in following the social media trends of the nominees. The MSN Award Buzz page features visualizations of the conversations online and predicts the winners. The application tracks public mentions across forums, blogs, news articles, Twitter, and comments for nominees in the Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress categories.

Predictions for award winners are made based on the volume and sentiment of these mentions. The predictions are then compared to expert picks from MSN sources in a graphic that visualizes both the volume and tone of the posts. You can also explore recent and relevant posts from the social web.

Created for MSN by interactive agency Deep Focus and Radian6, MSN Award Buzz launched just after the nominees were announced and has been tracking all the online Oscar-focused conversations leading up to this weekend’s show. Deep Focus created the cool application and visualization while Radian6’s platform powers the collection and analysis of social media mentions and feeds the application.

The overall buzz surrounding the Oscars has really begun to pick up with the show just a few days away. But don’t worry if you can’t catch it all—the MSN Award Buzz application will continue tracking the pulse of the online space live throughout the award’s ceremony. Check it out and see how your predictions compare with those of the experts and the public.

SOCAP Symposium
Atlanta, Georgia
April 25th-28th, 2010

Radian6 will be in Atlanta this April attending the SOCAP (Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals) symposium.  We’ll be exhibiting our platform during this 3-day event so be sure to come and check us out.  As well, our CMO David Alston (@davidalston) will be there to participate in an interactive learning session the morning of the 28th.   For more information about agenda and registration details, check out their site at www.socap.org.

Newcomm Forum 2010
San Mateo, CA
April 20th-23rd, 2010

We’re excited to be a part of the NewComm Forum this year in San Mateo, California.  Come and check us out at our booth where we’ll be doing demos and answering your questions about Radian6. 

NewComm Forum is the premier conference for unlocking the power of social media and new communications tools and technologies to make your organization more competitive, insightful, innovative, efficient, productive and ultimately more profitable.  For more details about this event, be sure to check it out over at www.newcommforum.com

Inbound Marketing Summit – New Marketing Experience
San Francisco, CA
April 13th, 2010

Come and meet Amber Naslund in San Francisco on April 13th.  She’ll be representing Radian6 over at the New Marketing Experience put on by the good folks at IMS. 

Here’s the scoop:
Imagine a world where you can take your One Big Idea™ and tap over 100 other participating conference attendee and experts and each of their One Big Ideas. All in a structured, fast-paced and highly interactive one-day program under the direction of Chris Brogan and the team from New Marketing Labs.
New Marketing EXPERIENCE is that world. Through six key discussion sessions this program will help you analyze and draw the best of what you need from these Big Ideas. Learn how to turbo-boost your marketing and business planning – this is the ultimate Business Ideas That Work conference.

For more information about this event, please go to http://event.nmlevents.com/sf/

Click Here to Download

By now, you’re probably neck deep in your social media initiatives. You’ve set some great goals for your programs and you’re ready to get started taking a look at how they’re impacting your overall business plan. Do we see any increase in leads because of our social media presence? Have we improved brand awareness and loyalty? Have our customer support costs been affected by our social media efforts?

If you’re asking yourself these questions, it’s great you stopped by, because we’re talking social media measurement, metrics, and analysis all throughout March. We’ve started by putting together a downloadable ebook – adapted from our Director of Community Amber Naslund’s blog series – to help you dive into the practice of social media measurement.

In this ebook, you’ll find step-by-step processes and explanations for establishing metrics that help you track the attention and reach of your social media programs; the lead generation, sales, and conversions that might be happening because of your social media efforts; and the cost savings you might be seeing because you’ve integrated social media into your business processes.

We gave you some great starting points for measuring the impact and engagement of your community, too, in our February ebook , and we’ll be tackling this topic in more detail on our blog this month.

The most important thing to remember about measurement – and what we emphasize wholeheartedly here at Radian6 – is that you have to have set goals and measurable objectives in place to make sense of the data you’re tracking. Without goals and objectives, without context, your data lives by itself and relates to nothing you’re doing.

It’s also important to track only the metrics that align with your goals. Harnessing all the information out there would be time consuming and confusing, and it would make nearly impossible to tie back that data to your goals and plans.

Our goal this month is to get you more comfortable with the concepts and processes behind social media measurement. There is no one way to measure, but we plan on addressing your questions and concerns to get you thinking about how you can identify and define the best metrics for your specific social media efforts and get started measuring.

Have any specific questions you want us to answer? Give us a shout and let us know what’s on your mind. And stop by when you can to see if we’ve addressed your concerns. We’re here to help.