We’ve talked a lot about “enterprise social media,” or embracing social across the enterprise and integrating it into every department where possible. When it comes to thinking about embracing social analytics across the enterprise, we all tend to get a little worked up. The social team says, “here’s what you need to take,” and other teams say, “those metrics don’t work for us,” and then the whole web comes crashing down when someone mentions three small letters: ROI.

In 2012, if you want to make an impact with social analytics learn to accept that you don’t need to re-invent the wheel just because you are tracking social. Though there are certain things that need to be specific to social, most need to be specific to what you are already looking at as an organization. It’s hard to stay on track with all the new formulas, buzz words and high expectations floating around so let’s work together to build out a list of guidelines.

Here are my top ones:

• Don’t pile on the metrics. Just because you can track everything doesn’t mean you have to, so keep things simple.
• Tie your tracking back to a business objective. Make sure you can show how tracking that metric is going to help your efforts.
• Find the why behind the numbers. Tracking an increase over time is great, but knowing why that increase is happening is so much better.
• Visualize the information. Just because you understand that spreadsheet doesn’t mean it’s going to hit your point home to your execs.
• Keep it fun. The culture of social media is relaxed and connected, so bring that into your reports by sharing pictures or specific posts from users.

Now it’s your turn. List your guidelines in the comments below! What are your guidelines for bringing social media analytics across the enterprise? What do we all need to do in 2012 to make analytics more integrated, engaging and valuable? 

Want to learn more about making an impact with social media analytics in 2012? See chapter four of this month’s ebook.

The State of the Union address Tuesday evening brought a large amount of social media conversations to Twitter and many other social channels. We’ve looked at this data over the past few weeks revolving around the 2012 Election primaries and decided that digging in to the conversations around the State of the Union would be another interesting topic to cover.

Some of you may remember the work we did in 2011 around the Twitter Townhall with the Whitehouse which hit home the fact that the United States is definitely a social nation. Looking back at that report and comparing it to what we saw during the State of Union mentions over the past day, here are some interesting facts we found.

•  Female gender in the conversations was 6% higher during the State of the Union
• The top age bracket was constant at 25 – 34 year old for both events
• @barackobama & @whithouse were the top 2 retweeted usernames for both events
• In event time frame, The State of the Union created approximately 7 times more social mentions (Approx. 518,000 to 70,000 social mentions)

If you are interested in learning more about the findings we had, you can download the full State of the Union report here.

With so much social media data flowing past our eyes every day, many companies use hashtags to try to understand their own small piece of the conversation. A hashtag is a word or phrase (with no spaces) preceded by a pound or hash sign (#). When added to tweets, this connects the conversations around a single topic. It is a functional bit of text and when you click on a hashtag in most Twitter clients, it brings up a search result of tweets with that hashtag. It can help companies watch the spread and reach of their ideas. Sometimes you see them around newsworthy topics (#jan25), companies (#radian6) or even events (#bwela).

The Good of Hashtags

Adding hashtags to tweets makes the most sense for online and offline events where you can share the hashtag with participants. Some of the best uses of hashtags are offline events because it creates an online connection of people who are in the same physical space. See our analysis of Blogworld Expo LA, based on their hashtag #bwela. If you are conducting a webinar and you want to know how many people share your ideas with their followers, encourage them to use a hashtag. You can capture these tweets in a tool like Radian6 and look at the volume of hashtag mentions, dig deeper into the conversations to understand what topics were most talked about, as well as who was talking.

Reviewing all this data lets you set conversation goals around the event. If you want to grow the attendance at future events, increasing the volume and presence of the current event draws attention to your events. A simple way to increase hashtag use is to include it on slides. Sample tweets also drive hashtag use. The data lets you see what resonated with participants. You can find influencers in the data, and see how engaged they were with the event. This can include new and known influencers. You can use your understanding of what caused people to tweet to improve for next time and reach your goals.

The Versus of Hashtags

Hashtags are used by a subset of participants talking about a topic. When tracking conversations and looking at data that supports your company initiatives, make sure you include terms besides the hashtags to get a complete picture of the social chatter. This is especially true when looking at consumer-driven events.

To social media veterans, hashtags are a natural part of how they tweet. Have you even been at an event where someone asks what the hashtag is? Less savvy presenters fumble to come up with something. If it is not something that has been pre-planned, you may not be prepared to track it. Or you may not know if it has been used for another event or ongoing conversation. It is always a good idea to plan a hashtag for any event, even if you don’t think your audience is the type to use it.

Many companies use hashtags on every tweet they put out. No matter what the tweet is about. This doesn’t create the brand awareness that they think. While straight retweets will pick up their hashtag, when they look at the data of usage, they will find that their #companytag is used almost exclusively in their tweets. This offers very little value. Hashtags that are about ideas are more likely to spread. If you encourage people to talk about a topic in your industry ask them to use a specific hashtag. This will let you promote something for the community, but also capture volume, preferred topics and Twitter users.

The Evil of Hashtags

Hashtags are open and public conversations, like most of the social web, that anyone can join. If a spammer or unscrupulous marketer sees a popular hashtag, they will start using it to promote their “offers.” In a study by Argyle Social, it was determined that hashtag stuffing doesn’t help a message spread or drive clicks.

If you are searching and tracking hashtags from a particularly large topic, like #socialmedia or the #superbowl, to find people and conversation topics, you are going to have to wade through a tremendous volume of hashtags mentions, as well as lots of irrelevant tweets. You definitely need to be prepared to do some heavy lifting, either with people or technology, but you should approach these efforts with more specific objectives and terms to make it a more manageable process.

Have you used hashtags to aggregate conversations around your online or offline events? What are some of your biggest challenges around digging into the data of hashtags? Learn more about measuring data in this month’s ebook.

“Social media analytics” is a phrase that can make some people very excited and others run for the hills. In 2012, why not start by getting comfortable with the different phases you’ll be working within when analyzing your social media data? This will prepare you for what to expect.

Metrics

Definition: There are the items you are going to count. The actual numbers. The metrics you choose to use should be agreed upon by your stakeholders.

Skills Needed: Understanding the metrics and ability to use software for tracking metrics.

Help: Need help getting stakeholders involved? Have a read of this post from Forbes David Vinjamuri that gives some examples of benefits.

Measurement

Definition: These are you results of the metrics. You will start to judge how certain metrics compared against each other and over time.

Skills Needed: A little logical and observation skills are useful at this stage.

Help: Check out this checklist from Katie Paine.

Analysis

Definition: Take a look at the measurements and start to make some observations like, “When we increase our tweets, our retweets go up.”

Skills Needed: Analytical ability to look at information and pull out conclusions.

Help: Tom Webster has great thoughts on letting the data speak for itself in Social Media Data Dredging.

Insights

Definition: Pull out your action items from your analysis. They link back to your business objectives. If your analysis showed, “When we increase our tweets, our retweets go up,” then you need to think about how increasing those tweets affects your time, resources and strategy for engagement.

Skills Needed: Analytical ability and knowledge of the business objectives.

Help: See this post from Olivier Blanchard on how to cut through and build real objectives.

Getting comfortable with these phases before and after analysis will help you take your social analytics to the next level in 2012.

What resources are you aware of that have helped you in the different phases? Who is involved on your team throughout each phase? What background or skills have you found valuable?

If you are looking to learn more about making an impact with Analytics in 2012, check out chapter 4 in this month’s ebook.

American Idol’s 11th season premiered last night on FOX and it was a social media smash. OK, so that probably surprises absolutely no one. Truth be told, I have been waiting to write this blog post since September. I was really interested to see how American Idol’s premiere would trend on social media compared to the X-Factor’s premiere in September. To keep the comparison consistent I used the the show titles and their associated hashtags for keyword search terms. At long last, here are the results.

X-Factor – premiered September 21, 2011

• Total social buzz – 66,986 mentions
• Day of premiere (before broadcast) – 212 mentions/hr (average)
• During the broadcast – 62,757 mentions

American Idol – premiered January 18, 2012

• Total social buzz – 330,004
• Day of premiere (before broadcast) – 2122 mentions/hr (average)
• During the broadcast – 287,715 mentions

To recap, Idol saw 263,018 more mentions than X-Factor’s premiere. That’s nearly 400% more mentions!

So where do you stand? Idol or X-Factor?

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association held their 69^th Annual Golden Globes ceremony last night and it was, as always, a star-studded affair. The broadcast, which is beamed into homes in one hundred and ninety-nine countries around the world, also generated over one million social media mentions on Sunday, January 15, 2012.

Here’s how it played out:

• Hours leading up to broadcast: 9,502 mentions per hour
• During the Golden Globes: over 250,000 mentions in the first hour
• End of ceremony: 727,199 mentions

One of the bigger topics of conversation going into the Golden Globes ceremony was speculation related to returning host and British comedian Ricky Gervais. Gervais stirred up a lot of controversy at the 2011 Golden Globes, taking direct aim at a number of high profile celebrities. His performance was disliked by many of the celebrities and at the time it was thought that he likely wouldn’t be asked back to host. Of course, Gervais was asked to return as host, his third year now, and the social web weighed in.

There were a total of 34,855 mentions of Gervais within conversations directly related to the Golden Globes on Sunday, January 15. Watching the broadcast, it was clear that many of the celebrities in the audience were cringing at his wisecracks and some looked visibly annoyed, however, he got a resoundingly positive review from those who weighed in on social. Using automated sentiment, 65.2% of social mentions were positive while only 34.6% were negative.

The next big award show is, of course, the Oscars. With the Golden Globes generating over one million mentions do you expect the Oscars to surpass this, be roughly equal, or come in under the Globes?

Step-by-Step Guide to Tracking your Twitter Stats

If your company is small, it probably means that – you’ve heard this before – “you wear many hats.” Perhaps one of your tasks is to analyze the effectiveness of your social media efforts.

When I joined Assistly, I found myself with a big hat closet. One of my duties was to create and manage our social media efforts. Without the luxury of procrastination, I dove in. But I didn’t want to be in the dark about what was working and what wasn’t.

I needed stats.  I needed to see if my efforts were paying off. I needed a light on in the hat closet.

The path I took for our small company would work for anyone. All it takes is a bit of organization and the will to take a few minutes every day to document your progress in a spreadsheet.

Open a Spreadsheet and Dive In

Open a new Excel spreadsheet. Think about what Twitter metrics you want to understand. I wanted to see the progress of all my efforts on Twitter so I could report on them and make adjustments to my category techniques. In general, metrics for social media generally fall into four categories:

• Activities –  my total tweet count
• Engagement – clicks, comments, retweets (actions your followers take)
• Size – number of followers
• Reach –  “mentions” others make of your company

Asking Questions: The Important First Step

Your questions determine the categories of data you will collect. For example, I wanted to know:

How many people were clicking on the links I tweeted? How many were retweeting? What kind of posts did they retweet? How many people were following Assistly? How many followers were we losing? Were we getting mentions? How many lists were we on?

Your column headings come from these questions. Here are some headings from my working spreadsheet:

Gather Actionable Stats with Helpful Tools

There are an intimidating number of tools available for social media activities and analysis. These are the four categories that were most important to help me answer my questions:

Twitter - Obviously, for Assistly, our Twitter account is the one-stop way to track total followers, accounts followed/following, total tweets, and lists.

Twitter is also an important visiting point every day in order to see our new followers, and decide who to follow back. It’s easier to keep ahead of this by checking every day, because the number of new followers each day is manageable (unless you have hundreds of new followers every day, in which case …mazel tov! Everyone should have this problem!). Following people back is an art and a science. You can be discerning or all-inclusive, but I heartily recommend avoiding the “junk” followers that are just there to advertise. I block them, without guilt.

A Tweet Shortener: I use Bit.ly for shortening Twitter links. Bit.ly also gives you analytics for daily clicks, and clicks per link. (Tip: If you are using multiple shortener methods in your tweet posts, you will need to add them together for accuracy on link clicks or daily overall counts.)

A Tweet Scheduler – Tweet schedulers not only get you set up for scheduling tweets in advance. They also track Twitter mentions and retweets and let you easily follow hashtags and specific words or phrases of interest to your organization.

“Unfollowing” Tools – Unfollowing on Twitter is normal. A lot of accounts come and go. It’s really only important to me whether people I follow are unfollowing our Twitter channel. That’s information that would alert me that I needed to correct course. For this, I use Who Unfollowed Me? It is so easy; just sign in with your Twitter account and get a look at who has unfollowed, and whether or not they were followers of your Twitter account.

Key Takeaways for a Small Business Using Social Media

Look for Patterns

Very quickly, you will begin to see patterns and adjust your tweets accordingly. Tracking social media in this simple way has given me a way to see the direction our social programs are going. When I look at the numbers, most often they are going “up and to the right” – and that’s the way you want them to go!

Check Your Ratings

Periodically check your ratings using services such as Klout. They couldn’t be any easier to use. They give you lots of great information about how you are doing compared to competitors, and the information is presented in appealing graphics. They help you up your game. Give your score a column on the sheet every quarter or so.

Take The Long View

Collect stats daily, and plan to add a row to total up each week and each month so you can see the bigger picture of progress over time. Every time you add a social channel, add a sheet to your Social Statistics Spreadsheet. Like an apple a day, it will help keep your business healthy, wealthy, and wise.

How did you develop your process for documenting Twitter progress? Do you use Twitter for customer service and support? Why or why not? What would your ideal Twitter tool look like? How do you use the metrics you collect? Do you have a specific format for reporting? Any stories about the impact Twitter has had on your company?

Alyson Button Stone is a member of the Assistly team, editing the Assistly Blog and managing the social media program. She has been “drinking out of the firehose” for startups for several years. Alyson is also on her second decade serving as a trustee for her public library.

Many B2B companies struggle to measure their social media results, and wind up tracking insignificant metrics like number of followers and fans, or in some cases measuring and reporting on nothing at all. Social media can take many forms in business, but no matter what they are, they need to be measurable.

Start with your business objectives
Social media does not exist in a silo. It must support your overall business objectives. Not only is this important from an organizational point of view, but it is critical from a success metric point of view. For example if a key performance indicator (KPI) of your B2B company is to improve customer satisfaction, you must, and I did say must, determine how your social media efforts can improve customer satisfaction.

How to get started
Let’s say your B2B company is focused on increasing sales, which for many B2B companies is measured by number of leads generated. It is not always a straight path from social media campaigns and activities to leads, and you may not be able to get there in one step. There are many things that need to be put in place, one of which is access to data. All the data you can get your hands on, from things like trackable URL shorteners, web analytics and lead generation data. You also may not be generating leads from day one, so you need to track all parts of the process and set specific goals for each stage.

It’s like building a bridge
Think about how some bridges are built. You start on each side of the bank and build out towards the river from both sides. If your calculations are correct, you meet in the middle. Developing a set of social media metrics happens the same way. Start on the east bank with your social media efforts and start on the west bank with your business objectives. Work forward on one and backward on the other to come to a meeting point. Connect the complete process from number of clicks on a link to views of a blog post to clicks on a call to action to views of a landing page to filling out a lead form. These are all measurable activities, but they need to be tied together from a measuring and reporting perspective.

The buckets are the hard part
The last step in establishing these metrics is the hardest part. You need to bucket all your expenses on the social media side to understand common business metrics like cost per lead. If marketing activities are evaluated by these types of measures, social media needs to be put in the exact same terms. When talking to your VP of sales about the value of social media for your B2B company, unless you can show results (number of leads) and compare them to existing measures (cost per lead), adoption of social media will not get very far.

For more detailed examples of what to measure and how to get started establishing social media metrics, here’s an awesome eBook about Social Media Measurement and Analysis.

What are your biggest challenges in social media measurement for your B2B company? What are some of the ways you have overcome them?

Jeffrey L. Cohen is a social strategist at Radian6 and the co-author of the forthcoming The B2B Social Media Book. You can follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen.

Markings on the kitchen wall as a child grows. Adding chocolate chips in a cookie recipe (and dumping in a few extra for good measure). Filling a test tube to the meniscus in science class. These widely different measurement-related scenarios not only have a sentimental tie, but the word is defining growth (child growing), creation (baking cookies) and testing (science class). And even when we refer to measurement in terms of social media programs, growth, creation and testing applies. Who knew we could get sentimental?

Measurement is Growth.

Social media programs cannot stay stagnant. They are living, breathing things that need to be nurtured and cared for as they grow and change. For instance, we’re sure you can agree that no two days are the same on your Facebook page or Twitter handle. Your customers and colleagues are conversing about different topics constantly and in order to engage in the conversation, you need to monitor and measure your social program. As you engage and learn the conversations and social media platforms that are most beneficial to your brand goals, you’ll adapt and grow your campaign in those areas. Which platform generates the highest share of conversation for your brand – Facebook, Twitter or something else? As we learned in the GNC webinar, blogs and forums housed the most conversations around health and wellness. GNC knew those platforms needed to be a focus for their own growth potential.

Measurement is Creation.

Results can taste as sweet as chocolate chip cookies if you just know how to create an effective social media program. Knowing who’s who your social media neighborhood helps to determine which direction you may want to go when delving into the space. You want to find that niche opportunity to stand out. This also enables the opportunity to be creative in your program. If you’re a bank and you see that Foursquare check ins are popular, create a Foursquare program such as a higher CD rate upon check in. Use the knowledge you gained from measuring the space in order to let the creative juices flow into your unique social media recipe.

Measurement is Testing.

A silver bullet does not come with a social media program. While there are many proven methods, trial and error is a great way to determine what’s working and not. And if you’re constantly measuring your results, you can determine results quickly and adapt your campaign accordingly. Consider A/B testing, whereby you try two different social media programs at once to see which one pulls stronger results. Last year’s Social Media Marketing Conference has a session on A/B testing. Here’s a recap.

This month, we’ve tied measurement to words like complicated and controversial. But measurement can be creative and educational too. It’s all about how you use it to work for you.

What comes to your mind when you hear the word measurement? Are there other terms that play into growth, creation and testing? Share your comments.

After the metrics have been defined, the report has been designed and the processes have been nailed down to an easy repeatable system, there is still something more that you can be doing with your analysis besides tracking & acting on your business objectives. That is improving the way you do your analysis.  But how do you do this? How do you use your reporting meant to dictate your business objectives, to improve the same reporting?

Evaluate Metrics
While you want to make sure to nail down a good set of KPI’s and metrics you’ll compare week over week, don’t be afraid to take an objective look at your metrics every once in awhile to make sure that what you are looking at is still important and relevant to you. Are you still looking for keywords around an old campaign? Reconsider and determine if this information is still valuable.

Shift as you Mature
When you are just starting out in social media, the metrics that may affect your strategy like “number of overall mentions” might no longer fully fit the bill once you move in to a fully engaged stage. Be sure to shift your metrics as you evolve so that they are still giving you the information you need. Perhaps you will move from “number of overall mentions” to begin to dig in to mentions in specific areas, or to evaluate the type of mentions that they are. Be sure to always be watching for opportunities to shift your evaluation metrics as your strategy matures.

Give the People What They Want
If everyone tells you how much they hate the look of the 90 day graph because it’s too hard to read, then definitely consider switching that view. In the same respect, if everyone loves the summary page make sure to keep that one around in your reporting. If you give people what makes sense to them, not only will they like reading the reports but they’ll make it a habit to do so.

Evaluate Yourself
If you are the only person that has built out your organizations metrics and you are the only person who works on the analysis side, you need to be completely honest to yourself about your capabilities. We all get caught up in thinking the way we do something is the best, but let’s be honest, it might not be. Take some time to evaluate how you do your analysis from the process you use right down to where you put the plus sign in a formula. If you can manage it, grab another set of eyes and walk them through your processes. It’s a great way to get new ideas and keep you on track.

What ways do you keep your analysis on point? What time frame do you use when you do reviews? How many people help to keep your analysis on track?