April 2, 2009

Free Measurement Tools?

Posted by Heather Thoreson under Measurement | Tags: , |
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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 31, 2009

To Buzz Logic, Measurement Matters

Posted by Heather Thoreson under Influence, Measurement | Tags: , , , |
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Buzz Logic is a technology platform for advertising agencies.  They are a measurement group that provides information to advertisers telling them where it is best to place an ad.  Buzz Logic calculates the influence of people leading conversations, as well as their expertise and credibility.  In one of my previous posts, I discussed the importance of measuring the influence your audience has over other readers.  This directly ties into that.  Buzz Logic is a resource for determining the influence of readers who comment and engage in your conversation.  They help their clients to understand how social media influences reader’s behavior.  This idea of measuring influence for determining where to place an ad parallels how measuring influence helps a company figure out how best to use social media.   

 Todd Parsons, from Buzz Logic, in an interview with Katie Paine explains how Buzz Logic works and how it relates to social media through advertising.  He states that Buzz Logic looks at all the conversations and finds the people who drive the conversation on certain subjects.  They figure out who is the most influential on a certain topic and who can gather audiences around that specific issue.  They find the influencers that you want and make them available to you, so engagement between your company and these people can occur. 

 As Parsons states, advertising and social media are still fairly new ideas, especially in content.  Buzz Logic finds the most influential people and isolate them.  Then, they rank their conversations they start.  This helps you decide which conversations you want to take part in.

 Knowing who is an influencer already can help you decide which social media strategy to pursue.  It can help determine what type of social media you want to engage in.  Influence is important because, as I said before, you want an active audience that will draw more customers to your site and therefore your company.

 

March 19, 2009

New Media in 2009?

Posted by Heather Thoreson under Measurement | Tags: , , |
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This year will have an impact on new social media.  The economy, as we all know by now, is not doing so well.  This means that companies are not as willing to experiment with new media using money they can’t afford to spend.  The fact is that they do not know much about measuring the results of their new media campaigns.  They want to know what the results will be from any action they decide to make.

 This is the underlying problem with this social media.  Determining the results is still a work in progress and each medium can be measured in any number of ways, depending on your definition of return on investment for any campaign. 

 Don Bartholomew, Principal of Acumentics Research, which is a social media and public relations research and measurement consultancy, states in his blog that measuring a mediums click-thrus or views won’t suffice anymore.  Companies want to how consumers are being influenced and engaged.  They want to know the impact of their actions on the company.  Simple statistics just doesn’t cut it anymore.  They don’t want to experiment now, they want facts to back up their decisions. 

 To do this, communication practitioners need to figure out the best way to measure the results of the new media that their company wants to use.  They need to evaluate the influence they have, the outcomes that come from it, and determine their return on investment. 

 In another blogpost, Bartholomew suggests some considerations for choosing the best social media measurement tactic.  You need to know what you specifically want to track, how content is brought to the site and which sites of these are most important.  You also want to know what type of analysis to conduct: automated or human analysis.  Also, engaging consumers and the cost of measuring are two other important aspects to consider.   

 Proper measurement of your new social media is essential.  Companies need to know this information before making any experimental decisions in 2009.

 

February 24, 2009

Difficult Measuring

Posted by Heather Thoreson under Measurement | Tags: , |
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 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.