Social Media Measurement: The Uninformed Leading the Ignorant? The Duplicitous Leading the Disinterested?

Remember the old Waylon Jennings country western hit "Lookin' for Love In All the Wrong Places?" (second verse, "I was lookin' for love in too many places"). Well, welcome to social media measurement.

Check the dictionary under 'Oxymoron' and you may find 'social media measurement' in the subheading. There might be some additional narrative under the '..moron' part. The problem is not that people arent trying to get a handle on this, it is that they are asking the wrong questions and then chasing the wrong answers. ROI (return on investment)? Yup, that's really important if you're a young MBA trying to impress your superiors in the corporate controller's office. But if you are using it to figure out what impact social investments may be having on building a network that moves customers to your product you might as well play spin the bottle.

In fact, looking at a recent report on what corporations are measuring, a bunch of them appear to be doing just that. Some of the measurement techniques being employed are as up-to-date as trying to get on Twitter from your dad's 1977 Atari game console. 78% report less than quarterly (in a 24/7 world) and some are measuring things like 'number of quality leads generated.' Yeah, we bet that'll keep the VCs happy.

Lots of vendors are pushing various 'solutions' that attempt to rectify the lack of data ('lookin' for love in too many faces...'). Some have promise and some are pure snake oil. The reality is that there is no The Answer. Determine what outcomes you want to influence and work back on what metrics lead there. Innovation is not just about product; it is also about process. JL

Sally Falkow reports in Ragan.com:

"The Proactive Report’s recent study of the top companies across several categories revealed that, on average, more than 80 percent are using some form of social media.

Yet another study shows that most companies have not figured out how to calculate a return on that investment. According to a Hypatia Research report, only 40 percent of companies measure social media performance quarterly or annually, while almost 13 percent of the organizations surveyed do not measure ROI from social media at all. Another 18 percent said they do so only on an ad hoc basis. Hypatia didn’t specify what response the other 29 percent gave.
Although we like to feel that social media marketing is maturing, it seems there are too many companies that are still throwing ideas and money against the wall, without even checking to see anything sticks.

The authors noted that there is room for debate on whether the Net Promoter Score belongs on this list, since it is a survey-based metric of how likely customers are to recommend a company or its products, measuring probabilities rather than actual performance.

Measuring actual sharing and recommendations would be more effective.

The cmbPulse study of more than 1,500 consumers by market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that 60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower. An impressive 51 percent of Facebook fans and 67 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.