Analytics Is King

Impressions are totally worthless! Why would I measure total or unique pageviews? I care more about behaviors! Followers, likes, Twitter lists are completely meaningless. Stop me if you've heard any of these comments (or variations therein) in your career....I'm guessing you have, right? In the words of Lee Corso, "not so fast my friend!"

So many conversations about measurement get bogged down in the weeds. Even if we are starting at the proper place -- the planning phase -- the natural instinct is for us to focus on the metrics themselves. I'm not a psychologist, and I don't play one on television so I'm not going to guess as to why that happens. It just does. Where should the focus lie if it doesn't focus on the metrics?

This is a conversation MUCH older than I am so you've probably heard this before, but you start with the business objective. What's a common business objective? Growing your business or improving financial performance, right? As soon as you've landed on that you can focus on the business metric. What's a common business metric? Growing sales of a particular product right? In addition to growing sales, a common business metric is raising awareness of a particular product. When you've landed on those two elements, you can then focus on specific social media metrics. Awareness and sales are two items that are quite often business and social media metrics.

At this point, you've all likely seen, heard or read the article from McKinsey a couple of years ago about how customers are starting to move outside of the traditional purchasing funnel. If you've ever done any digital consumer research (listening, surveys, consumer segmentation analysis, etc...) you'll know that McKinsey is right. How people search for and find information about your product is changing (it might've already changed for whatever that's worth). However the funnel is changing, product awareness is still a component of the funnel.

Now, before I go any further please know that I'd never advocate using JUST awareness-related business metrics or social media metrics. That's where the wheels do fall off of the tracks. Awareness, like any other business metric is just one component of the measurement process. You'll probably also want to track interactions, brand loyalty/affinity and, gasp, sales. Again, though, you'll want to make sure these metrics are aligned to overall business objectives before you start putting anything in stone.

So, if you agree with me and are going to start looking at awareness-related social media metrics more closely what should you be looking at? Impressions, pageviews, likes, followers and Twitter lists are all great places to start. But what about things that aren't served up to you on a Facebook Insights platter? What about aided and unaided awareness questions from a survey? It's certainly possible and in fact it probably should be done more often than it is now. Have you thought about creating a standard survey instrument that you can post on your social media communities? If not, start TODAY.

Awareness metrics aren't the devil. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Awareness is an important part of the sales funnel today, and in the sales funnel that McKinsey represents in the article linked to above. If awareness is part of your overall business goals then awareness should appear in your measurement scorecard. Period.

Go forth and be aware!

 

Social analytics and measurement are sexy...Or, so I've been told by my good friend Ken Burbary. And guess what? He should know. He lives this space as much as anyone else. Everyone online is talking about it. People are "rebranding" themselves as analytics experts in the hopes of gaining the eye of a potential employer. Can't say that I blame them. This is an important discipline to understand. It's important to have professionals in social media who can speak this language. The questions from senior executives aren't going to slow down, so you better develop a mechanism to report on your success.

One of the inevitable byproducts of that "sexyfying" is professionals across the spectrum racing to develop a system to report on performance. That race leads to, in many instances, strict platform reporting. We've all created them, right? The reports with a simple grid showing how many followers, likes and comments we received over a period of time on Facebook. I'm not pointing the finger at anyone because I know the issue is pervasive. Over the long-term that kind of reporting approach isn't effective for upper management. And, truth be told, you aren't really maximixing the full potential of analytics.

That kind of approach also leads to tweets like the one Brian Solis posted today (see below). To try and get inside of Brian's head for a minute, I think he was trying to say that we should blend an approach of reporting on what we've done with an analysis of where we should go in the future. On that point we agree. If we're truly moving toward social businesses (which I think we are), social media analytics needs to move beyond reporting and toward a collective intelligence model.

If the intent was to point out that looking in the rearview mirror was wrong, or that we have "analysis paralysis" (a phrase he uses in the video included below in reference to having an abundance of data) then I couldn't disagree more. The only way you can understand where the future may lie for your social platforms is to understand where they've been in the past. Where social business professionals need to go is away from data and more toward insights.

Look, the issue isn't data or the amount of it. The issue isn't your boss asking you to develop reports every month (as much as you'd like to blame them). It isn't even whether you can measure social media (you can). It isn't even with how we define analytics, which I'm realizing is a very confusing term for people. The issue is with poor planning. Planning is poor at the benchmark research phase and equally poor when we're measuring performance.

Let me give you a few things to chew on if you're planning to do benchmark research or developing a collective intelligence approach or even measuring your platforms.

• Think about the platform-specific metrics AND the behaviors you've impacted - It's absolutely fine to be reporting on platform-specific metrics like likes, followers, likes on posts, impressions, pageviews, etc... Those things should be part of your scorecard. However, so should things like clicks, intent to purchase, referral traffic to places where consumers can buy your product, comments, shares and sentiment. These things are all behavioral.
• Collective intelligence, or the new world order of business intelligence includes more than social media. Social media listening, even as Brian desribes it below isn't going to replace your offline market research so make sure you bring them to the table. Also, while you're at it, make sure you bring along the search, web and mobile guys as well. I've talked a lot about collective digital dashboards before. It can be done if the parties communicate and plan with each other.
• Develop a standard approach for reporting and listening - How does listening data feed into the organization? How often are you going to report? Are there different versions of the report you need to create? Which tool are you going to be using to gather data? Who within the organization is going to be in charge of managing the tools? These are just the tip of the spear to really unlocking the potential of collective intelligence within the organization.

I'm not sure what to expect out of 140 characters, but on its face Brian's tweet is troublesome. The video is better, but we need to know that data isn't going away. We need to work toward harnessing it to maximize communications impact. We need to be working on developing measurement frameworks that our bosses believe in. Lets stop talking about the abundance of data and work toward doing something with it.

Yesterday, I took a look at the potential metrics you could be using to measure your performance on Twitter. Thus far, the response has been rather interesting. I think I expected someone to come here and challenge my assumptions on what metrics matter most. That hasn't happened. In fact, most of the responses so far are coming from folks who want to focus more on the content. Tracking the number of @ replies, and engagements and the raw mentions of the brand. All of those things are fine, but you should know they present some serious challenges, including:

• Content fluidity - Ever watch your "all friends" column on TweetDeck (or whatever third party app you are using)? See how quickly that column is moving? Analyzing content on Twitter is important, but it's akin to watching cars on a busy highway. Just because you saw it posted, doesn't mean a lot of others did. Take your results with a grain of salt.
• Sentiment scoring is problematic - I mentioned this yesterday, but scoring tweets is incredibly hard. Nuanced language. Limited characters. Much of the content being repurposed news. You see the point. Manual scoring is better, obviously, but the sheer volume of tweets makes that difficult. 
• Looking at raw @ replies doesn't tell you much - Sure, you want people talking to you on Twitter. Sure, you want to be talking to others on Twitter. However, looking at the raw number of @ replies doesn't tell you much. You should be more concerned with the behavior that follows an @ reply. Does the person talk about your brand more/less often? Do they tell their friends something positive about the experience? If you want to look at @ replies, you also need to be looking at the other behaviors as well.

Either way, these metrics and approaches can be debated. As I mentioned in the post yesterday, metrics and approaches will vary from company-to-company. Those were the metrics I thought made the most sense, but you could easily disagree. But, Twitter isn't the only social channel. What about Facebook? Ahhhhh, Facebook...

Have you ever taken a look at the export from Facebook Insights? It's a pretty substantial list of metrics. In fact, you can get lost in that spreadsheet for days (well, at least I can)! So what would I look at if I'm measuring my progress on Facebook? This discussion can actually be split into two parts, I think: Platform and content

First, the platform:

• Comments
• Likes
• Total interactions (I'd say look at either the first two or combine them into total interactions)
• Clicks (or CTR)
• Shares
• Impressions
• Pageviews
• Overall likes
• Per post metrics (impressions, comments, likes, shares)
• Sentiment of comments

Second, the content:

This becomes a little more science than anything else. First of all, you need to be sure you are capturing all of your posts in some kind of spreadsheet. Capture the post verbatim, the day/time it was posted and the message "bucket" it might fall into. Then, figure out which post metrics you care most about. In most instances, we're talking about comments, likes, clicks, shares and impressions. Then, after capturing all of that data you'll want to create an index score from 0-100 for the posts. See my post for PR Breakfast Club on how to do this. You'll create a ranked list of your posts from 0-100. What constitutes a good post on that scale? I don't know, that's up to you and your client/boss. But, taking this approach will allow you to really hone in on what content is performing the best across a serious of metrics.

This sounds incredibly labor intensive and time consuming, but trust me, it isn't. As soon as you've created the structure, it becomes a matter of populating a spreadsheet everyday. Surely, you have someone who can do that, right?

What do you think? How are you measuring Facebook today?

We're always (hopefully) interested in how our social channels are performing versus last week, month, year or even versus competitors. To that end, marketers of all stripes often wonder what the best metrics are when evaluating the performance of a particular platform. Depending on the platform in question, the selection process can be daunting. Take a look at a Facebook Insights export sometime and follow the Excel spreadsheet across and you'll see quite a few possibilities.

Yesterday, I received such a question from a very good friend of mine as it relates to Twitter. Now, my typical (maybe snarky) response to these kinds of questions is asking why that wasn't settled weeks/months ago when the page was launched, but we're talking about a friend here so I obliged. While I'm here, though, remember the process of identifying metrics? Setting goals, conducting benchmark research, developing strategy/tactics, implementing your program and then measuring. Go through that process and you'll save yourself some headaches at the end.

Anyway, her question prompted a thought... If I had to rank which metrics I think are the most important for Twitter, how would I rank them? Again, go with me here... How important these metrics are will vary from company-to-company, but I think the discussion is a worthwhile one to be having. First step in this process is writing down all of the available metrics you can think of for Twitter... I'll give you a second to do that...Ready? What did you come up with? I came up with:

• Clicks
• Clicks/post
• Retweets
• Retweets per post
• Tweet reach
• Retweet reach
• Average reach per tweet
• Percentage of posts that are @ replies
• Number of lists
• Followers
• Sentiment? 

A few things on this list...

• Clicks, and clicks per post are probably the two most important metrics in my opinion. Why? They can be easily tracked to a specific end result that the brand cares about (landing on their website and buying something, for example).
• Notice how far followers is on the list? Yeah, moving on. That should be obvious. Looking at followers alone doesn't tell me anything.
• I have a question mark next to sentiment. After posing this question on Twitter, both Justin Goldsborough and Jason Keith raised the point of tracking sentiment on Twitter. My only issue with it is that tracking sentiment on Twitter is problematic at best. Limited characters, nuanced conversation tone make it very difficult to nail down. If you're using a sophisticated text analytics platform, I'll jump on board. Otherwise, I'd be nervous...

If you're managing a Twitter presence, what metrics are you using? What have you found has worked with your client or boss?

 

How many times per day do you hear the word, "no?" If you work on the agency-side, you likely hear it quite a bit. Hearing "no" from clients is actually a good thing. It means we need to go back to the drawing board to tweak an idea that we had to improve its business. The days where clients approve ideas as we present them are few and far between. Again, that's OK. Part of our role is to push clients with ideas they may have never considered implementing before.Often "no" is the impulse reaction to those ideas.

"No" can certainly be constructive. It pushes us to levels we hadn't necessarily considered before. However, in an industry that's relatively "new" the word "no" can be stifling. For reasons passing understanding, digital analytics (applies to social media analytics more narrowly as well) tends to be one of those areas where we hear "no" a lot. Why? There's a significant amount of fear of the unknown at play, but genuinely it has more to do with a lack of understanding of the subject matter. Contrary to popular belief, we aren't all data analysts. Tell a marketer he/she is a data analyst in the "new world order" and wait for the reaction. All I can say is get out your shield...

Anyway, if the practice of digital analytics is going to advance beyond its current state we need to start pushing some barriers. What does that mean exactly?

1. Listening needs to *actually* penetrate the rest of the enterprise - When Ken Burbary and I created the social analytics lifecycle almost two years ago, I think our assumption was that listening outside of marketing/PR was going to take hold a little more quickly. Turns out, that really hasn't been the case. It's unfortunate because building dashboards for folks outside of marketing/PR is the quickest way to spread the power of digital market intelligence.
2. Understanding the value in gathering intelligence through non-traditional methods - I struggled with a way to talk about this that wasn't negative, but in the simplest terms we need to understand that with the advent of social media comes an entirely new way to collect data. It's not the same way it was done in traditional market research, and that's OK. We need to understand potential pitfalls with the data, and collect it nonetheless. 
3. Cohesive digital analytics teams - Traditional market research folks have a lot value in this new world order. Surveys aren't going away. Search analytics folks also have tremendous utility as the connection between search and social becomes even more clear for everyone. Ditto social and traditional media folks. You see where I'm going here...
4. Avoid "dumb" measurement debates - Some colleagues may disagree with me, but measuring digital performance belongs under the digital analytics umbrella. No matter where you think it belongs, we need to move beyond dumb debates like whether ROI actually stands for return on investment in social. Or whether social media can even be measured. Or, gasp, whether influencer analyses can even be conducted (they can). Lets focus on substance over these things, please?
5. Testing and learning - The best social programs are born out of testing and learning. Its been that way for quite some time now. The same must hold true for digital analytics. We need to try measurement models that incorporate all kinds of disparate data sets. If it doesn't work, we start anew. This also includes building influencer models that incorporate lots of different kinds of metrics in an effort to really understand what's driving consumers to buy our products. I could go on for awhile here, but you see the point. Test. Learn. Execute. This needs to be the new digital analytics paradigm. 

What I'm getting at here (perhaps not as coherently as I had hoped) is a new analytics ecosystem that needs to be created within companies. This ecosystem involves traditional market research, search, social, mobile and web. Answering "no" to bringing these pieces together isn't a wise plan. During BlogWorld NY, Ben Edwards of IBM talked about its push to truly integrate data across the enterprise. If IBM is talking this way, it's about time we all start talking this way. Yeah, before you jump all over me...I know...It's IBM. Here's the thing though... Almost every enterprise is gathering data across those spectrums. Almost every enterprise has "someone who does that." So why don't they all sit in a room and talk? Novel, right?

Anyway, I'm hoping that the analytics ecosystem I'm talking about here doesn't take years to manifest itself within companies. If it does, it does. However, I'm going to be doing my part to talk about this idea with clients. If they tell me "no," it just means I'm doing my job to always push the envelope and that we're genuinely trying to test and learn.

What do you think? Am I crazy?

So, tomorrow kicks off BlogWorld Expo NYC. Of course, we're all buzzing in anticipation of the first BlogWorld to be held outside of Las Vegas. Everybody loves New York, right? And, of course I'm biased, but the content at BlogWorld is second-to-none. A couple of weeks back I provided you three sessions that I thought were under the radar, but definitely worth your time at the event. Today, I wanted to give you three must-see sessions while you're here. Yes, again, I'm biased. And yes, again, these are all from the social media business summit track that Arik Hanson co-organize. So, without further delay...

1. The Social Habit - One of the best in the business, Tom Webster, is going to be releasing some VERY cool data on how we interact on the social web. In addition to being a great speaker, Tom gets social media and gets analytics. Trust me, that's a rare combination. It should be an excellent presentation, and one worth your time.
2. Applied Social Media Measurement - Of course, right? The analytics guy is pumping up the measurement panel. BIG SHOCKER, right? Wrong. In this instance, you have four people on a panel that are actively doing measurement for clients. And not just DOING measurement, these people are experts in this field. Make sure you check this one out during the week.
3. The Rise of Social Commerce - Yeah, I'll admit it...I've been Sally Skeptical on the topic of social commerce for the last few months. My beef isn't with whether it is important or not. It is more so that I'm not sure that the mainstream world will be adopting it at near the clip we think they will. Is mobile commerce happening? Of course. How quickly? That's still TBD. This is why I'm very curious to sit in on this session. I have no doubt that I'll be convinced of something different coming out of the room.

Please know that Arik and I give great thought into what submissions are accepted for BlogWorld. However, we're under no delusion that we've nailed every topic or know of all the great speakers on particular topics. Remember, we have to do this all over again in Los Angeles so if you have thoughts please don't hesitate to comment here or find one of us during the event. I'm looking forward to it, and I hope you are too.

At the risk of sounding like a complainer, or as someone who is always ranting, I wanted to take a second to address some recent developments in social media. Of course, there are things daily that cause one to shake their head or pump their fist. Social media elicits strong opinions from all sorts of people. Whether you're on the client or agency side, young or old, you likely have an opinion on something related to social media. That's cool. In this case, opinions are mostly good. Opinions mostly help us push the space forward. However, as with anything in life these opinions have limits.

There are several memes in social media that should cause you to scratch your head. If you aren't scratching your head, you aren't close enough to your clients or bosses to understand what's really important to them. For example:

• Social media experts are "clowns." Let me be perfectly clear for a second - I think Gary Vaynerchuk does amazing work. He's an incredibly smart guy who's done a lot more for the space than I have done to date. However, when he called 99.5% of social media experts "clowns" he was wrong. Not that there isn't a large number of faux experts, it's just that companies don't care. If you're good, companies will recognize it. If you suck, companies will cut bait. If you think otherwise, you're wrong. And no, for the record, it doesn't make the job for those of us who know what we are talking about harder. It actually makes it easier in the end.
• Snake oil salesmen - This is another one of those memes that should die a very quick death. It's in line with my first point here, but companies just don't care. They don't care what you think of other people in social media. They care how YOU can help THEM. End. Of. Story.
• Social media is not really media - Tell you what, try an experiment with 10 people you know within large companies. Ask them whether they think social media is actually media, or whether it is an accurate reflection of what the space is or does. I'd bet my life that 10 out of 10 will either stare blankly, say they don't care or both.
• Defining ROI - Again, I'd bet you a significant amount of money that a marketing professional within a company has never once asked themselves whether ROI in social media actually means return on influence or return on engagement or whatever other stupid RO acronym you'd like to come up with. ROI within companies is return on investment. Nothing else. Stop it.
• Does PR or corporate communications or marketing own social media - This is one you could possibly argue, but realistically companies only care how those elements come together to deliver a strategic approach to social. Who owns it is a secondary concern at best.

Just so you don't think I'm a complainer, what should we be talking about?

• Measuring social media effectively - We need less talk and misinformation about measuring social media. At Ogilvy, we approach measurement as KPIs and diagnostic measures. KPIs could be things like sentiment, or positive share of voice or, gasp, sales. Diagnostic measures are those that are specific to the platforms you are using. If you are using Facebook you might look at clicks/post, likes/post, comments/post, etc... Again, it depends on your goals. Lets start talking with companies about how they can effectively measure social media success.
• Defining, measuring and implementing influencer programs - There is a significant amount of debate about how to measure and define influence. A lot of informed opinion, I might add. The jury is still out, but influencer programs aren't going away any time soon. We need to land on appropriate proxy metrics for influence, and soon. We need to understand how we're appropriately leveraging our lists, and soon. There may never be total agreement, but we need to get closer than we are currently.
• A more strategic approach to social - Unfortunately, social media is still overly tactical. Companies that are incorporating elements of paid and earned media into social campaigns are actually few and far between. We need more of that. We need more companies who want to leverage social across the entire enterprise (read: a truly social business). Social media can help your business, but only if you let it be more than a broadcast channel.
• Using listening data proactively - There is some value in using listening data reactively as a marketing intelligence tool, but it is most effective when your content is nimble enough to be influenced by conversations you are seeing online about your brand and your industry. We need to be formalizing listening teams at the brand level in order to do this well. Yes, it costs money, but ask Dell whether the social media listening command center hasn't already paid for itself. I bet it has, and not just by a little.

I'm sure there are other things we should be talking about, and I'm hoping you'll come and do that for us. Either way, social media needs to stop acting like the next iteration of Ringling Brothers Circus by focusing on things companies couldn't care less about. Lets refocus on what's important, and help to really drive business value. Who's with me?

 

Just when you thought you had seen everything... Here I was, just going about my Monday...Catching up on e-mail and my Twitter stream when my good friend Heather Whaling sent me a link. Now, I think the world of Heather, and the work she does for her clients so naturally I clicked on the link. If only I could hit the rewind button and NOT click on that link. I spent the rest of my Monday trying to calm down after reading this post. What post is that you might ask? Ragan's PR Daily posted an article written by Jessica Epperly of The Wakeman Agency on measuring the value of editorial coverage. This post starts off innocently enough comparing and contrasting the role of advertising and public relations within organizations. Advertising is paid and media placements are earned...Yada yada yada... We've all heard that song and dance a million times. Where this article really comes off the tracks, at least for me, is in the discussion of how we measure success in PR and advertising. Yes, my friends, you thought right: We're back in the world of advertising value equivalencies. Ugh..and here I thought we were well on our way to moving beyond these ridiculous metrics. Perhaps we are and this is an isolated case? One can only hope, right? I don't want to go too deeply down the path to discredit advertising value equivalencies as a metric, but if you wanted to read more on the subject I'd suggest you check out the works of Don Bartholomew, Katie Paine and Sean Williams. All of them have done EXTENSIVE work to discredit the value of AVE's as a metric to evaluate success in PR. Much of their work can be found on their blogs, but I'd also encourage you to check the work from the Institute for Public Relations on this subject. It's all great, and it all, pretty much, tells the same story - advertising value equivalencies are a scourge on the PR profession. As I said, I don't want to go much down the path of discussing the science (or lack thereof) behind AVEs. However, there are a couple of things that have me very concerned after reading this article:

1. This is what makes measurement hard to talk about with companies - There is no doubt that Ragan.com is a reputable site. I read PR Daily myself, quite often, when it comes across in the stream. However, publishing an article like that is pretty reckless. We already know there is great misunderstanding about measurement in the marketplace, and by posting something that's so egregiously wrong you only serve to feed that beast. Similarly, there are going to be a lot of companies out there reading that article, looking for a measurement solution and using it as sort of a "bolt on." This will only lead to companies measuring the wrong thing more often than they currently do.
2. For the 400th time, advertising and PR DO NOT carry the same value - I'm not getting into which one of the disciplines is better than the other. I truly believe that a successful communications mix incorporates all elements of paid, earned and owned media. That being said. there hasn't been any research that I believe that would suggest advertising and PR deliver the same value to organizations. The answer, in most cases, is it depends. Some companies get more mileage out of advertising, while others get more out of PR. It depends on where you sit.
3. Page rank is so bogus I think I want to vomit - As if the discussion of AVEs in this article isn't enough, we go down the page rank path?! Oh, for the love of... "Whether your story appears at the beginning or the end of a magazine can impact the media value," says Epperly. Well, no shit! However, are you sitting over the shoulder of someone reading said magazine to know if they are making it to the end of the magazine? The answer is no, and the math behind trying to apply some sort of figure to those kinds of situations is less than ideal.

Listen folks, I'm all for integration. I want an integrated approach to communications and measurement. Unfortunately, blending PR and advertising by using advertising value equivalencies is a recipe for disaster. The better approach is to come up with a list of metrics that are reasonable measures of success for PR, and run with it. If some happen to be influenced by advertising, then great. Have that conversation. Until then, though, DO NOT USE AVEs. THEY ARE A SCURGE ON THE PROFESSION. CAN I GET A WITNESS?

There has been a lot of discussion over the last few days about public relations and social media measurement. Actually, there has been a lot of discussion about public relations and social media measurement over the last few YEARS let alone days. Todd Defren got the ball rolling with his post about PR measurement fails, and using Web metrics as a gauge of success in PR. The truth of the matter is that Web metrics could be one potential gauge of success, but talking about it in a vacuum won't work. Then last night's #pr20chat discussed a very similar topic, and it didn't take long for the discussion to go slightly off track. Instead of talking about the process of identifying metrics, we ended up talking a lot about individual metrics. That, my friends, is what we call the measurement rabbit hole. As soon as you start down that path it's very hard to pull yourself out of it. By now we should all have the steps toward successful measurement beaten into our heads, but if not....

1. Benchmark research
2. Developing measurable goals and objectives
3. Creating a strategy and tactics
4. Implementing said strategy and tactics
5. Measuring results

There's a lot of explanation under each of those phases, but that's not the subject of this post. I know several people in this industry have tried (including the wonderful Katie Paine) to get people's focus off of one metric and onto the process above. This should be pretty self-explanatory for most of us but one metric is not an appropriate measure of success. Most often when one metric is used to define success it is impressions, and we know how imprecise that is as a metric. Why is there this over reliance on one metric? Is it just because of our hatred of math (which I think is a total cop out by the way)? Are we not spending the time to create a list of metrics using the steps outlined above? Do we not know what metrics we should be using? It is probably a little bit of everything, and that's where this post comes in... One of the things I raised in Todd's post and during last night's chat was using a series of metrics to create an index score. Now, before you start wigging out over the use of the word "index" give me a second to explain what I mean. I think if we put our minds to it and didn't cop out about our hatred of math, we could come up with a list of metrics that not only fit our particular campaign but are widely accepted as metrics in the field. This could be anything from impressions (I hate them, but you should know they are used still by many companies and are accepted), sentiment, mention prominence, spokesperson quoted, mention in a target publication, raw number of overall mentions and the presence of key messages in the articles. Those are mostly traditional PR metrics, but I'm sure you could come up with a similar list for social media. These metrics taken individually don't mean a heck of a lot, but brought together into some sort of score tell a pretty powerful picture. So how do we go about creating this "index?" The process is actually much easier than you might think...

1. Come up with a list of metrics - Ideally, you'll use the process outlined above to arrive at those metrics and not just cherry pick off of what you've always done or what you know others are doing. Frankly, it doesn't matter if you have 5, 7 or 10 metrics. Just come up with the right ones for your campaign.
2. Determine which metrics matter most - If you have a list of 10 metrics, you should think about which of those matter most as the ultimate gauge of success. Is it change in sentiment? Is it mention prominence? Whatever it is, you should identify some sort of ranking for those metrics.
3. Applying a weight - As I said, this isn't scary math. After you've come up with your ranked list of metrics, you should apply a weight to each of them totaling up to 100. So if you have 10 metrics the weights of those 10 metrics should equal 100. No, you can't just give everyone of them a weight of 10. :)
4. Creating the index - Truthfully, this is hard to replicate in a blog post using Excel but if you're using this post as a template feel free to drop me a line and I can help you setup the spreadsheet. It actually isn't hard, but I'll just confuse people trying to explain it. Suffice it to say that you should have three columns for each metric - the metric itself, the index and weighted index. Anyway, drop me a line if you have specific questions on that.
5. Coming up with the score - At the end of the day if this is done right every "mention" in your database is going to have a score from 0-100. You should figure out the ranges for what you'd categorize as a home run and what you might categorize as a bad hit.

That wasn't hard, right? You've incorporated a series of metrics into a cohesive PR measurement story. You can easily see now how a similar process can be applied to social media, right? This isn't tough stuff, if you build the process up front. Have you ever built anything like this? If so, come and tell us about it so we can all learn.

For all of the good information that is shared online there is just as much that could be (generously) considered questionable. Two of the areas where you see the most misinformation is in monitoring and measurement. Why? Frankly, some of the blame has to be at the feet of the challenges we've faced in traditional communications. We've had a hard time truly grasping the utility of monitoring beyond a reputation management function for years. Similarly, traditional communications measurement has been butchered seven ways to Sunday despite the great work of Katie Paine (and others) to educate everyone. For the record, I refuse to blame that butchering on communications professionals not liking math. That feels like a thoroughly uneducated answer to me. There are a lot of other factors there that we'll explore some other time, but for the purposes of this post know that measurement (well beyond social) is being butchered. Yesterday, Todd Defren wrote a great post about PR measurement failures. The trouble as he points out there is that we have widespread acceptance of formulas and concepts that really don't mean a heck of a lot. The scenario as he painted it was: “Say the client spends $100,000 on PR, in one year.  For the sake of argument, let’s say PR is the biggest (or only) marketing vehicle.  In that one year time period, the client gets 1M website impressions.  Could you not divide 1M impressions by $100K and claim PR is driving leads to the website at a rate of 10–cents per impression?” Wow. Interesting, eh? You can check out the comments for all of the rebuttals (including my own). Here is the hard and fast truth... While we have generally accepted best practices for measurement none of them are without fault. My suggestion to Todd in that post was to come up with an index model that takes into account several different metrics. I'd consider that best practice, but I'll admit there's no direct ROI tie there. While there could easily be a connection made to brand reputation, the metrics are soft(er). Don't get me wrong, we should be searching for the harder metrics/calculations/formulas, etc... However, I'd much rather move the debate toward coming up with a generally accepted framework rather than the Bataan Death March approach we take toward ROI. It wont be perfect, but at least it would be generally accepted. Monitoring, unfortunately, happens to be in the same boat. Upfront, I think it's important we clear up one small misconception: monitoring is NOT measurement. Monitoring helps to inform measurement, but the two terms do not mean the same thing. Now that this is out of the way, when you're going through the process of picking a monitoring provider you need to know that no tool offers 100% capture. No tool is going to offer you 100% technological stability. There will be bugs, and there will be conversations that the systems do not capture. What should you look for?

1. The tool has the ability to adapt - By adapting I mean if you find a source that the tool is not capturing can you send them that source and they can modify the "net" to begin capturing it. If the answer is no, then it is time to look for a different solution.
2. The vendor is adding sites on their own - Obviously, the onus shouldn't be on you to identify new sources for them. They should be taking it upon themselves to advancing the "net" to capture as many sites as possible.
3. Consistency - No matter how diligent you/they at updating their platform, there will be sites that are missed. Just accept it. The worst case scenario, though, is for a certain set of sites to be missed this week and then next week a whole different list is missed. If we're going to have a gap, we should know that the gap is going to be consistent so that we can potentially identify other tools that could help.

With respect to Lexus, the pursuit of perfection in measurement and monitoring is silly. We should be pursuing what makes the most sense for our clients and our organizations. If the metrics fit the goals of the campaign and is generally accepted by those constituencies, then use that methodology. End of story. What has worked for you in the past? By the way, thanks to Kasey Skala for inspiring this post.