CONCLUSIONS Paper
Five Best Practices for
Social Media Measurement
How to link social media metrics
to business results
Insights from the webinar, Less Talk + More Action = Better Results, in
the Measure What Matters: Redefining Marketing Success in the Digital
Age series, presented in association with the American Marketing
Association and SAS
Featuring:
Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners
John Bastone, Global Customer and Media Intelligence Manager
at SAS

Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
If there’s anyone out there who still believes social media doesn’t warrant
serious consideration, consider some basic facts: There are more than
750 million active users on Facebook, 140 million unique visitors to the site
each month, 200 million registered Twitter users, and more than 100 million ■ If anyone still believes social media
professionals on LinkedIn.
is just an online playground for
That’s just for starters. In addition to social networking sites, there are blogs,
egocentric chatter, look at the role
comments on traditional media and e-commerce websites, review sites such that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
as ConsumerSearch and Epinion, content-sharing sites such as YouTube and have played in mobilizing protests
Flickr, and collaborative projects such as Wikipedia. in the Arab revolutions of late. The
ability to connect and communicate
Nearly half of Americans now get their news from the Web. One in five reads
blogs. More than 80 percent of Americans use social media in some fashion over new media has even reshaped
each month. the dynamics of international
rebellion, so just think what it might
Some of those people just might be talking about your brand – and your
do for your business.
competition. Some may be ambassadors and advocates, or they may just
as easily be detractors and malcontents – but all their voices are in the mix,
shaping customers’ buying decisions. Who would want to ignore it?
However, in this age of accountability, can you be sure that investments in
social media are worth it?
Can you prove the bottom-line value of this ephemeral new media?
■ “Social media is the preferred
contact channel for many people
these days. A lot of outbound
marketing and sales effort happens
Social Media: Driving Profits or Just Popularity? through Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn. More than half of my
“Accountability has never been more important in marketing,” said John Bastone, clients never respond to an email
Global Customer and Media Intelligence Manager at SAS. “It isn’t just about increasing
but will respond immediately to a
awareness anymore; it’s about what we are doing to drive profitable revenue growth.
In my role at SAS, I speak to a lot of customers and at a lot of conferences about Facebook comment, message or
the benefits of data-driven insights across a wide spectrum of technologies, such as tweet. Call a client by phone, and it
campaign management, search engine optimization or Web analytics. Nothing has might take three days for a return
generated more buzz – or brought more scrutiny – than the topic of social media,
call, but that same client might
specifically how to get more value out of that channel.”
respond immediately on Twitter.”
Organizations often do not reap the value they should from social media, for Katie Delahaye Paine,
CEO of KDPaine & Partners
several reasons:
• It is not being used very effectively. In an informal webcast poll, nearly 60
percent of audience members said their organizations are ineffective in their use
of social media. Another third think they’re getting there. Only one in 10 claimed
their organizations were doing a good job of it.
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Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
Those figures align with the results of a recent survey of more 2,100 senior
marketers, conducted by SAS with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services
(The New Conversation: Taking Social Media from Talk to Action, October 2010).
The study found that the use of social media was stronger in certain segments –
such as retail, organizations with more than 10,000 employees, and the computer
services and professional services sectors.
• Risks are magnified on social media. Bad practices in traditional media
marketing are just as bad on social media – except the mistakes can reach more
people faster and create more damage. Consider Kenneth Cole’s misstep in a
widely derided tweet about unrest in Egypt. Or Edelman and Wal-Mart’s gaffes in
creating fake blogs. Or the pervasive habit among marketers to use social media
for screaming without listening.
• Social media has been mostly about intangible effects. When asked to
name the primary benefits social media has brought to their organizations, most
respondents in the study pointed to increased awareness, website traffic and
favorable perceptions of the organization.
Awareness. Hits. Happy thoughts. That’s all fine and well. It’s gratifying if consumers
“like” you. But do they buy? Do they recommend? Does all this awareness, website
traffic and goodwill translate into dollars and profits?
For most organizations, the answer is, “Hmm, we don’t really know.” In a webcast poll,
70 percent of respondents said their organizations did a poor job linking social media
efforts to profits. When asked the most pressing challenges they face or anticipate
facing with social media, shortfalls in this area topped the multiple-choice list:
• 41 percent — Understanding the potential of social media to make a difference in
the business.
• 40 percent — Measuring the effectiveness of social media activities.
• 31 percent — Linking social media activities to an impact on company financials
and/or ROI.
No surprises there, said Bastone. “Organizations realize the benefits of social media as
it relates to awareness, but now the question is how to link this to tangible value in the
company in a way that starts to justify the investment.”
Becoming Effective with Social Media:
Three Areas of Focus
To evolve from “ineffective” to “effective” in social media requires organizations to
focus on three areas, said Bastone: listening to the conversations that are out there,
processing the structured and unstructured (text) data available from social media
channels – and then doing something about it.
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Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
1. Listen
Organizations need to grow a bigger set of ears, said Bastone, borrowing the phrase
from colleague and social media guru Chris Brogan. “If you want to find out what ■ “Being in the public domain, social
customers think about you, there’s a ton of data out there on message boards, review media conversations represent a
sites and discussion forums. You need to become more aware of these alternate resource-rich source of customer
sources and pull them into your monitoring efforts. At the same time, you need to be
information – as well as a good
able to filter out the irrelevant content in a very standard, repeatable way.”
source of competitive information.”
Use social media scanning tools to find out what people are saying. Listen for public John Bastone,
Global Customer and Media Intelligence
relations opportunities, marketing opportunities and customer service needs. Track
Manager at SAS
the sentiments in conversations. Align all of this to internal metrics. For example, how
many customer service complaints are you finding via the Web?
Look deeper than the conversations du jour, Bastone advised: “It’s not enough
to listen to just the last seven days or 30 days of commentary. Your listening and
measurement efforts should start to accumulate a year or two years of sentiment,
so you can see trends and understand whether a shift in sentiment is significant or
seasonal.”
2. Process
Taken at face value, the social media data you collect will be only marginally useful –
just figures that tell you what was, but not necessarily what that means, or what to do
about it. With analytics, this data can be processed to deliver useful insight:
• Descriptive statistics clarify activity and trends, such as how many followers you
have, how many reviews were generated on Facebook, and which channels are
being used most often.
• Social network analysis follows the links between friends, fans and followers to
identify connections of influence as well as the biggest sources of influence.
• Text analytics examine the content in online conversations to identify themes,
sentiments and connections that would not be revealed by casual surveillance.
The text analytics part of it is an emerging science with exciting potential. This piece
alone has several elements to it:
• Content categorization. The system scans social media content and organizes
it into logical categories, said Bastone. “You’d want to be able to say, ‘This
is a public relations thread that deals with corporate reputation,’ versus ‘This
is a customer service thread that deals with issues of customer satisfaction.’
Organizing content by category is a core piece in being able to triage
conversations for routing to the appropriate people in an organization.”
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Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
• Text mining. In the same way that you can use data mining to explore data in
your databases and establish relationships, you can now do the same thing
to all those unstructured text documents. You can dig around in volumes of
emails, Facebook comments, consumer reviews and more, and look for themes,
connected concepts and volumes of conversation.
“Visualization tools make it easy to see what people are talking about right now,
what issues are hot and which are not,” said Bastone. “So you don’t necessarily
have to know what you’re looking for, to understand what is important right now.”
• Sentiment analysis. This form of natural language processing looks at how
people use words and phrases in context, and then assigns a sentiment –
positive, negative or neutral – based on the words people use. You can classify
and categorize the sentiments in online content, look at trends over time, and see
significant differences in the way people speak either positively or negatively about
you – and your competition.
3. Respond
There are two elements to this: responding internally and externally.
Share with your audience. Comment on blogs and participate in conversations –
and not just to hawk your product or service. Be visible, be where the community
is, answer questions, reply to emails, offer help, funnel complaints into the customer
service workflow, and build relationships with bloggers. Publish useful, informational
and responsive content via blogs, online newsletters, photos, slide decks and videos.
Act and adapt. Insights from social media should be embedded in business
processes, said Bastone. “All this listening and processing are ultimately about being
in a better position to acknowledge and respond to issues that are coming in through
social channels in real time or near-real time, being able to change your underlying
business processes in response to positive and negative sentiment that’s coming in
through your social channels, and ultimately integrating that into everything you do.”
Five Best Practices to Get the Most from Social
Media Measurement
1. Consider all the ways social media can drive profits.
“Social media as a channel tends to be most strongly aligned with marketing or
marketing communications,” said Bastone, “but its impact is reverberating across the
enterprise. Many different groups have a vested interest.”
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Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
The most obvious business functions that can benefit from social media
tracking include:
• Online media analysis. Where are consumers talking about you? How is volume
trending? Who are the most influential sources? Which sites are more positive?
■ “Some online conversations are
Negative? relevant to marketing, public
relations and sales, but just as
• Brand and market tracking. What do consumers say about your brand, your many are relevant to customer
products and your competition? What is the impact of these discussions? Who service, competitive intelligence,
are the influencers? human resources, investor relations,
product development – or anywhere
• Public relations and reputation tracking. What are online journalists and else in the organization where it’s
bloggers saying about your organization? What is the threat to your reputation? meaningful to listen to customers.”
Where are the opportunities to build advocacy?
Katie Delahaye Paine,
CEO of KDPaine & Partners
• Customer feedback management. How do perceptions voiced on social media
compare to direct customer feedback from other sources? Are there issues that
require response or resolution?
The key is to create business processes whereby information from social media is
translated into action. Customer complaints should be funneled to a customer care
center. An identified need can be routed to a sales contact. An influential blogger can
be referred to the public relations department as a potential new media contact.
2. Know what you want out of social media.
Define the R in your ROI. To be able to prove the ROI, you have to have a tangible
business goal to begin with, said Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners.
What is the return that you’re hoping to deliver? Why are you doing this? What is the
problem you are trying to solve?
Define the audience. Who are you really trying to reach? It’s one thing to go out there
and reach 57 million people, but that’s not very meaningful if those 57 million people
are not really your target market. Home Depot may reach the world with their social
media presence, but if the closest Home Depot store is 70 miles away, you’ve got to
have a lot of loyalty and engagement to win that part of the audience as customers.
“You need to be brutally honest about your target audience and whether you are in
fact reaching them,” said Paine.
Establish benchmarks. “Everyone tears their hair out and says, ‘There are no
benchmarks in social media.’ But that’s not really true; there are. There’s always your
competition – your peers – that you can benchmark against,” said Paine. Instead of
asking how much positive sentiment you have, you’d want to know your share of
positive sentiment amid all positive sentiment in the marketplace. Conversely, if your
business operates in a controversial area, you could gauge your relative - rather than
absolute - share of negative sentiment.
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Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
Define your Kick Butt Index. “What do your bosses define as ‘kicking butt?’” asked
Paine. Find out what causes them to say “Congratulations, you are really kicking butt
out there,” or “Hey, we’re really getting our butt kicked.” What are those metrics? If
executives agree to this up front, you have a tangible way of proving the value later, ■ “The first thing you have got to
said Paine: “You can say, ‘We agreed the metric we were going to be judged on was
understand is this: It’s not about you.
cost per new customer acquired. That number was $67 a year ago; it is $37 today, so
I am in fact kicking butt.’”
Too many marketers think social
media is basically just another way to
get the word out, when in fact it’s a
3. Make it a two-way conversation. very different entity. The entity is the
conversation.”
“Marketers are having to make an adjustment to account for the fact that the ‘social’
part of social media demands a give and take,” said Bastone. “As online conversations Katie Delahaye Paine,
CEO of KDPaine & Partners
about your business are happening, you need to not just talk about yourself, but
engage people in a two-way conversation.”
Paine agreed: “The first thing you have got to understand is this: It’s not about you.
Too many marketers think social media is basically just another way to get the word
out, when in fact it’s a very different entity. The entity is the conversation.”
There are lots of ways to use social media not just as a way to get the word out
there, but to touch customers and interact in ways that you couldn’t do before, said
Paine. Savvy marketers will use social media to engage customers with the brand on
a personal level, conduct customer meetings, gather feedback through surveys and
focus groups, and identify opportunities for business development.
When Paine posted on Facebook that she was planning to build a brick walkway that
weekend, she received a comment from Home Depot with a link to an instructional
video about how to build brick walkways. By offering to help as a trusted advisor –
rather than making an overt sales pitch – Home Depot ended up scoring the bricks-
and-mortar sale … literally.
4. Forget about impressions and hits.
“For too long, we have been focused on counting eyeballs, and there is no way to
count eyeballs effectively, consistently, or accurately in social media,” said Paine. “So
just give it up.”
Half of your Twitter followers are robo-followers; they’re not real anyway. You may know
how many people like your Facebook page, but how many are paying any attention to
what you post there? Even the sites/services that track hits, visitors and impressions
are doing it inconsistently.
“I say ‘hits’ stands for ‘how idiots track success,’” said Paine. “If all you’re doing is
counting hits, you’re not tracking anything that is meaningful in today’s marketplace.”
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Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
Paine defined a five-level hierarchy of measurements, with each tier offering
progressively more engagement – a more meaningful measure of how well you’re
doing with social media.
■ “f you just take the customer
I
At the lowest level are the simple, descriptive facts comparable to “impressions” in
satisfaction score – ‘Did you like the
traditional media: how many followers, friends, likes, visitors, hits, comments, etc.
“Impressions are a zero level of engagement,” said Paine. “You don’t care how many lobby?’ ‘Did you like the guest room?’
eyeballs you reach; you care what those eyeballs have done,” which brings us to the – guests may not be able to pinpoint
next level. the thing that made them feel that way.
If you are evaluating the design through
“Did they go to your site? Did they click through from the link you gave them? I classify
likes as a Level 1, because it’s so easy to hit that like button,” said Paine. “My metric
some kind of analysis, you need
is not how many likes there are, but how many likes there are relative to how many specifics about what is creating that
people actually engaged in conversations on the site. Maybe 98,000 are likes, but if perception, and that’s challenging.”
only 20 or 30 people are actually engaging in conversations, that’s not exactly a high Stephani Robson, PhD,
level of engagement.” Senior Lecturer, Cornell School
of Hotel Administration
Most organizations are measuring at the more participatory Level 2 or 3, said Paine.
“If you are really good at getting engagement levels up there, you’ll get people who
retweet, repeat comments and share posts. That’s a very high level of engagement.
Ultimately (Level 4) you want their identity; you want them to register in some form, say
nice things about your brand, and (Level 5) make a purchase and recommend you to
others.”
As you move up the levels, the numbers will likely be small for now. It’s important
to set management expectations appropriately. The absolute numbers – how many
click-throughs or visitors – are not nearly as important as what percentage of people
are moving up the levels. From month to month, as social media followers and friends
move from Level 1 to Level 2 and up, you’ll know how well you are doing in getting
people to engage with the brand.
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Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
5. Blend social media data with internal data.
“Social media is a hot channel for understanding and interpreting online conversations,
but it isn’t the only source of conversations,” Bastone noted. “If you really want to
evaluate sentiment, conversations, topics, what people care about or don’t care about,
it doesn’t make sense to analyze social conversations in one silo and other customer
communications in a completely different silo.
“It gets really interesting when you start to blend social media data with internal data,
such as the sentiment captured from call centers, surveys, customer service records,
behavioral data, online chat and customer emails.” Supplement with external customer
research, brand research and Web analytics to create an even richer view of the
customer.
“Bringing this all together gives you a common lens to understand customer
conversations and sentiment – and a much better handle on leading indicators,” said
Bastone. “If an uptick happens across channels, that is a more reliable insight” to use
as the basis for forecasting and other business decisions.
Closing Thoughts
Marketers talk about “going where the fish are,” but traditional methods are notoriously
inefficient for getting there, said Paine.
First, there’s demographics. “You say, ‘OK, I have a fish that is this long and this wide
and purple, and I know that statistically, 70 percent of all women between the ages
of 18 and 55 like this particular fish.’ Then you send them an email or a junk mail or
something. The reality is that they don’t care. They really don’t care. Consider this:
• 44 percent of junk mail goes into landfills unopened.
• Response rates of less than 0.25 percent are now considered acceptable.
• On average, less than 1 percent of all emails are opened and acted upon.
So using demographics is not a very efficient way to reach your target audience.”
What about traditional mass media? Inefficient fishing as well, says Paine. Suppose
you run a lawn care company that puts an ad in a paper that reaches 50,000 people
in a geographic area. You’ll reach potential customers who are so far away that, with
the high price of gas these days, you’d be losing money on their business. Among
customers within a certain radius, perhaps half don’t even have lawns, and half of
the remaining prospects actually prefer to mow their own lawns. Ultimately the target
market is a small subset of the larger audience you paid good advertising money
to reach.
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Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
“In reality, you want to help the people whose lawns are unkempt,” said Paine.
“You’d want to drive around the neighborhood and just contact people whose ■ “There are technology solutions
lawns are a mess and say, ‘I can help you.’ That’s what engagement in social media that sift through huge volumes
enables you to do. It enables you to identify somebody who has a problem, and earn of online conversations, parse
their trust and loyalty.” textual data to discern sentiment
and share of conversation, map
If you do that well with social media, can you prove it? Yes. Thanks to new search sentiment to business issues and
and analysis tools created for social media, you can connect click-throughs that lead track click-through paths to your
to sales. You can track changes in sentiment in discussions about your organization. website. These tools are enabling
You can correlate sales to social media channels and campaigns. You can show the progressive companies to do a very
ROI. good job in showing the ROI.”
John Bastone,
“Conversations have always been going on – around the water cooler, in front of the Global Customer and Media Intelligence
television set, and in the aisles of your grocery store and everywhere on the planet,” Manager at SAS
said Paine. “They’ve always been going on, it’s just that we never were able to track
them before. Now we can.”
About the Presenters
Katie Delahaye Paine,
CEO of KDPaine Partners
Katie Paine is the CEO and founder of KDPaine Partners LLC and author of
Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator’s Guide to Success
and The Complete How-To Guide to Measuring Social Media. Paine also writes the
first blog and first newsletter dedicated entirely to measurement and accountability.
In the last two decades, she and her firm have listened to millions of conversations,
analyzed thousands of articles, and asked hundreds of questions in order to help
her clients better understand their relationships with their constituencies. Learn more
about Paine at www.kdpaine.com.
John Bastone,
Global Customer and Media Intelligence Manager at SAS
John Bastone is an integral part of SAS’ Global Customer Intelligence Product
Marketing organization. With more than 15 years of experience performing marketing,
computer programming, consulting and analytics roles for companies such as Verizon
Data Services and Catalina Marketing, his areas of expertise are behavior-based
marketing and social media analytics. Learn more about Bastone at
www.linkedin.com/in/johnbastone.
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Five Best Practices for Social Media Measurement
To view the on-demand recording of the webcast: http://www.sas.com/reg/web/
corp/1291086
For more on SAS® Social Media Analytics: http://www.sas.com/sma
To view other AMA webcasts: www.MarketingPower.com/webcasts
To view the SAS and Harvard Business Review Analytic Services research paper, The
New Conversation: Taking Social Media from Talk to Action: www.tiny.cc/amasas
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