Hi! My name is Heather Thoreson and I am a student at James Madison University. This blog is dedicated to figuring out how to measure social media in an effective manner to achieve communication objectives. Keep posted for weekly updates!
April 2, 2009
Free Measurement Tools?
Posted by Heather Thoreson under Measurement | Tags: Measurement, MeasurementCamp |Leave a Comment
In my previous post, I described Buzz Logic, an agency that can help you measure your social media. If that agency does not suit your needs, there are many free measurement sites that might help.
MeasurementCamp is a wiki that is dedicated to providing resources for any company interested in measuring their communication in social media sources. They have divided up their list of tools into sections based on what you want to measure (your return on investment).
If you want to measure how visible your brand is to other people on the internet, there are a few sites you can use. HowSociable? is a tool to help you determine that. On this website, there is a search bar where you can type in your brand’s name and then click the button that says, ‘Measure Visibility.’ From here, a number of boxes will come up and give your brand a score in 22 different metric areas. These include Google, Facebook, and Twitter searches. These scores are generated from the number of posts, pages, photos, etc. that have mentioned your brand name.
If you want to search the blogosphere, Technorati is one site that is able to help with that. You can search for top blogs based on links, posts, or tags. This can allow you to see the most talked about topics and allow you to search for what people are saying about your company.
If you want to keep track of the buzz floating around the web, Trendpedia is a useful site. This site tracks finds trends in social media and keeps track of who is discussing what, when, where and how. You can set up Trendpedia to track posts and articles about your topic every day or just on a specific day. This helps you stay informed about what is being said about your company or idea.
Other categories for measuring social media that MeasurementCamp includes are message board and Twitter searches, measuring website traffic, and searching data. Also, you could search through multimedia sites, such as YouTube and Flickr.
There are many ways to measure your use of social media and it all depends on what you determine your return on investment to be. It could be qualitative or quantitative, but you need to be able to measure so you can know whether your actions are successful or not.
March 26, 2009
Blog ROI: To Measure or Not to Measure?
Posted by Heather Thoreson under Measurement, Return on Investment | Tags: blog ROI, Katie Paine, Shel Holtz, Windsor Media Enterprises |[2] Comments
From a blogpost by PRSquared, More on the Menace of Marketing Measurement
In my previous posts, I have talked about how companies should always measure to determine the return on investment of their actions. I have written that company CEO’s will want to know this so they can know what to do and how to invest their money.
Yet, some experts, such as Katie Paine, have stated that measuring the ROI for blogs is a waste of time. She defends her statement by assuming that everyone already knows the power and the results of having a blog. Once you know that you need this certain technology, then it is a waste of time to measure because you already know the value of the blog. You know that the consequences of removing the blog far outweigh the benefits of keeping the blog up and running.
Shel Holtz responded to Katie Paine’s post in his own blog. He stated that people are caught up on the fact that return on investment relates to money. He says that we should look at it as a cost or a risk benefit analysis. Holtz counters Paine’s statement that measurement is a waste of time by saying that many executives fear the consequences and still do not understand the benefits of blogs yet. He feels that measurement is still needed at this time to keep proving to executives that blogs can create benefits for their company. Once CEOs see blogging as essential to their company, then measurement will not be required.
Windsor Media Enterprises responded to these postings, by Katie Paine and Shel Holtz, about the measurement of blogs. They tended to agree with Katie Paine. They said that the value of blogs is too intangible and is a waste of time to measure. They feel that as long as a few things, such as blogrolls, links, and comments, are included in your blog, you will receive those intangible returns. Also, to get these returns you need to connect your links, branding, and conversation. If you do these things, Windsor Media says that measurement is not required because you will already know the benefits.
Yet, measurement is still a needed skill to have whether you agree or disagree about measuring blogs. Katie Paine concludes that if you want a job in PR, you better make sure you have math and analytical skills for measuring.
March 17, 2009
What About Influence?
Posted by Heather Thoreson under Influence | Tags: citation analysis, Flemming Madsen, Heather Yaxley, Influencers |[4] Comments
Picture from Onalytica Blog, in a blogpost explains how Person A might intially influence many, but those do not go on to influence many more. While Person B does not influence many in the beginning, those influenced go on to influence more and more.
While measuring the outcomes and return on investment are good ways to determine if a social media tool is affecting other people, another place to look would be to influencers. Your blog may be popular, but popularity does not always add up to influence. You want to know if the people you are influencing are in turn influencing more and more people. You will want to have a chain reaction instead of a one-stop situation.
Heather Yaxley, a teacher of CIPR qualfications and a part-time professor at Bournemouth University, states that real influencers have credibility and can be trusted as a spokesperson. Even if you reach a large number of people, can they be trusted to influence other people, therefore bringing a larger audience back to you?
These ‘real influencers’ that you want to reach are an active audience. They reach another audience that might be beyond your initial scope, but are another active audience that will get drawn to you, because of the first set of influencers. This is the kind of chain reaction you are looking for. You are looking for the influence, not the popularity.
Yaxley references Google as the “word of mouth on steroids.” A Google ranking is a measurement of a site’s popularity, but not necessarily it’s influence.
So how do you really measure influence?
Flemming Madsen, publisher of the Onalytica blog, gives an example of how influence is actually measured. He wanted to find out who the world got information from about the bird flu. They wanted to know who people relied on the most, which would be the person with the most influence.
To measure influence, they used the method of citation analysis. This is where you collect everything that has referenced a certain topic, which then creates a specific equation that will provide the relative influence of each journal, article, website, etc. The equation figures out who was referencing whom. It looks at how the chain reaction was created and identifies the influencers.
March 5, 2009
How to Measure ROI
Posted by Heather Thoreson under Return on Investment | Tags: Katie Paine, ROI, Technorati |[3] Comments
To measure your blog in terms of return on investment (ROI) you will first need to determine what it is you want to define as your return. There are many ways to measure a blog but you need to know what you want to measure first before you begin.
In a self-made video, Jason Wells interviews Katie Paine on measuring ROI in social Media.
Paine explains how there is no standard measurement to quantify social media. (Even though you can read more about measuring at her blog, The Measurement Standard!) But Paine goes on to say that you need to attract the right people to your blog and measure the visitors that stay and return to your site. You need to determine an audience and what the return is that you want from these people.
You can measure the traffic of your blog if you just want to see how many people travel through your site. Along with measuring traffic, you can measure the number of links, comments, and trackbacks to your blog. Here you type in your blog name and this will pull up the information you want about your blog. You might want to also determine the ratio between the number of your posts and the amount of comments you receive.
These are ways to quantify the return you are getting from your blog. This will help you get started on measuring the value of your blog, but you still want to keep in mind the ways that the outcome of your blog might be more important than just numbers.
March 3, 2009
How to Measure the Outcome
Posted by Heather Thoreson under Outcome Measurement | Tags: Behaviors, Katie Paine, Outcome |[4] Comments
Measuring the outcome of your new social media requires tracking the change of behaviors of the audiences that view your blog, video, or listen to your podcast. To do this, you first need to identify what behaviors it is you want and then compare that to what is actually happening. To analyze this, you could directly ask people what changed their behavior. Another way would be to move your focus from one aspect of your blog to somewhere else a few times, and record the responses and behaviors that follow these changes you made. Measuring these behaviors is measuring the outcome.
Katie Delahaye Paine, explains six steps to quantifying blogs and other social media on the web.
Ms. Paine describes the ways to get started on measuring how successful you can be. You need to know what motivates your audience and to measure this you need to remember that audience member behavior can show up in many different ways. It could be your return on investments, responses, attendance at different events, votes, etc. But instead of only looking at these activities quantitatively, you need move past that and look at the end result. What are people doing differently now that they have used the information you provided? What made them change their mind? You need to ask these questions and track the behavioral answers. This will help you to figure out what your blog or other new social media you have created can take credit for.
February 26, 2009
The Outcome is Better
Posted by Heather Thoreson under Outcome Measurement | Tags: Outcome |[4] Comments
Joel Postman, in his book SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate, quotes Einstein saying “…not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” This statement is true for beginning to measure new social media. But measuring the outcome of your blog has become more important than measuring how many people see it. Reach isn’t as important as who sees your blog and what they do with the information you put out.
For how many blogs out there, it is sort of like how the advertising market has become. People are overwhelmed by how many advertisements that are pushed at them that they are now refusing to see the ads and skipping over them. They are now specifically searching for what they want and overlooking the rest. Blogs are being created everyday. People might be not be bombarded with every blog that comes up, but there are an overwhelming number of blogs people might stumble upon. While someone might reach the site of your blog, you do not know if they stayed and read your blog or just kept going on to something else. Knowing how many people passed through your site could be helpful, but not in the long run. It would be much more beneficial to know how many relationships you are creating that will be sustained over a longer period of time, than just a few seconds that it takes to glance at a screen and move on.
Knowing who is reading your blog and actually using the information you provide is important to know for anyone trying to create a successful blog. You will want to know the impact you are having on your audience before you continue. You want to know this because if you know who is regularly visiting your site, you can tailor information to suit more specific needs. Angela Sinickas says in her article, Measuring the Impact of New-Media Tools, it is better to know who reads your blog, so you can know the impact that it can create. It would be better to know that a reporter read your post and wrote about you than knowing that 30 people visited your site today.
You can create better outcomes for yourself if you can target whom you want rather than how many people you want because if you get the right readers, they will communicate and more readers will come.
February 24, 2009
Difficult Measuring
Posted by Heather Thoreson under Measurement | Tags: Measurement, Nielsen |1 Comment
New social media are constantly emerging into the day-to-day scene of the business world. Corporations and regular people alike are using these tools to engage in two-way conversations. Social media is used to create participation between businesses and their publics. Many corporations are afraid to use new social media because they don’t know how to measure their return on investment (ROI) and don’t know how to measure their success with these new tools. Measuring new social media is still difficult, but it can be done.
You cannot use traditional means to measure the success of new technology. People are moving and do not want to spend time filling out mail-in surveys, which your corporation would then have to wait to receive and then review anyway. Time is becoming more valuable everyday and cannot be wasted. So… learning to measure new social media effectively is very important. You can begin to measure this technology by the number of blog posts about your company, the number of comments, the tone of the posts and comments, video views, click thrus, how many visitors to your site, and how much content on the first page of a search. These are just some ways to start, but not necessarily the only ways or the best ways.
Jon Gibs, the Vice President of Media Analytics at Nielsen, describes a program called Buzzmetics at Nielsen in the video provided below. Gibbs explains, toward the middle of the video, that new blogs are important to measure, it does come with problems.
These problems are caused because this social media is so new and has not had time to find the best ways to be measured. So how do we know the best ways to measure our social media tactics? We don’t. But we can try to find out.
