Thanks to the Altimeter Group and Web Analytics Demystified, we now have a framework for deciding how to measure progress with social media marketing — a draft model that’s worth talking about. Both firms have introduced this framework with an explanatory white paper on the co-authors’ respective blogs. Courageously, they’ve done so under the “Open Research” model to galvanize industry-wide commentary and collaboration so the framework can be refined and extended.
Put It in Context
Their paper advocates positioning this framework within a larger planning context, so the social marketing objectives align with the organization’s broader goals and KPIs. To me this is a key point, and one that’s often overlooked in the euphoric hype that tends to surround “social.”
If you narrowly measure social media tactics without aligning them to a larger strategic context, you’re just measuring activity. (That’s like measuring reach and frequency in the old realm of advertising.) The question is, how will those activities help drive business results? How do they link to your most valuable customers or prospects? Which influencers have the most impact on the people you care the most about?
Which are leading indicators, and which are trailing? Which measures will drive actionable insights, given your strategies and key business drivers?
The authors of this framework are well aware of these issues; however, the framework won’t achieve its intended purpose if it’s not set in the right context. That’s the job of the social marketing team, with potential help from their advisors; and it must be negotiated with the business– and line managers inside the enterprise.
Where This Framework Will Be Most Effective, And Where It Won’t Be
Like the social media monitoring technologies themselves, this model is best suited for larger, established organizations, ideally those serving gazillions of consumers; companies blessed with household brand names — or existing marketplaces where conversations among consumers or a company’s partner base are frequent, voluminous and well underway.
At their core these technologies require significant activity volumes before underlying trends start to become apparent or predictive. Sadly, if you work for most start-ups or new ventures, there’s less out there to be measured and analyzed.
Similarly, if you’re in a highly specialized B2B niche, you may find yourself struggling to find those needles in the proverbial haystack. Or worse yet, you may not know where the conversations (sparse as they may be) are taking place. Where the heck is that haystack, any way?
You’ll be challenged when the most important conversations take place behind “pay walls” that are inaccessible to most of the monitoring platforms, unless (a) you own the pay wall and have the wherewithal to help the platforms’ developers troll your content, and (b) their business model and technology strategy enable them to do so. That said, this sort of customization tends to be costly.
Case In Point: SMB
Here’s what confronts a certain 3-year-old B2B technology start-up with revenues measured in the tens of millions. Before beginning a coherent social plan, this firm’s brand name (their company name) averages only 3 mentions a day — and that’s before filtering out the mentions that have originated from the company itself or its employees. No one is talking about them, online at least. And yet, they’re generating revenues. (There are other indicators of marketing fragility, which the company has discovered by analyzing internal data sources, such as customer spending patterns and churn rates.)
To be fair, this should be viewed as a benchmark: the situation pro ante, before they begin any social marketing programs. This company has functioned without a marketing department (or marketing budget) for most of its history, as you might surmise from this chart. (And yes, they’ve just hired a marketer, so hopefully this picture will look a lot more attractive a year from now.)
It’s obvious that one of their first challenges will be figuring out what their customers want to talk about, the issues on their mind, and where those conversations are already taking place — the conversations out of “ear shot,” as it were. Fortunately, they have begun a real-world dialog (by phone) to hear what’s on their customers’ mind.
But they’re not alone.
New Business Objective: Discovery
This is an area where I see recurring limitations in today’s platforms for social media monitoring: the early discovery process for B2B markets.
This a painful and highly fraught phase: when you don’t know what you don’t know. And as most strategists recognize, it’s the things you didn’t know that you should have known that are most likely to kill the company.
So my personal addition to this framework would be a new row linked to a business objective called “Discovery.”
The purpose of the “Discovery” phase, which should precede the “Foster Dialog” phase, is to uncover what people want to talk about, what’s on their minds, etc. This could help reveal unmet needs or latent opportunities that could be ripe for the right companies, value propositions, ventures, nonprofits, what have you.
A related goal is to discover who is talking or blogging, where and when, and what the general “social technographics” profiles are for people in this arena, as described on in Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, and on Forrester’s groundswell blog. (Charlene is now a partner at Altimeter Group, one of the two firms that sponsored the research that resulted in this proposed social marketing analytics framework).
And because this phase generally occurs during the unfunded, or under-funded stage of a company or product lifecycle, the tools and technologies available here will have to be affordable — or they will remain out of reach and under-utilized by the start-up community, category pioneers, and other entrepreneurial innovators.
Revised on June 4, 2010
