Measure it! Getting To Grips With Social Media

I dropped in to the Measureit! event last week- a two hour think-tank of marketers, PR folk and SMarties. This post is more a collection of thoughts from some of the issues raised on the morning which I scribbled down as it went along.

Some feedback on the event itself, the length, presentations (10mins each), group work and overall pace was spot on. It posed more questions than answers for me (and that’s cool) so the free entry is about right. I’d be happy to pay a small amount in future, but I think something like this needs to stay free until there’s some real actionable outputs for social media marketing measurement. That’s my general feeling for social media marketing events/courses in Ireland anyway. These kind of getogethers are to be encouraged and are definitely beneficial to anyone involved with social media and online business. Kudos to Damien Mulley and the speakers.

First up was Dena Walker talking about The Uneasy Relationship Between Social Media & Measurement where she called for some honesty from those involved in social media marketing in particular those in agencyland selling it to clients. This is something that has never really sat well with me. As a marketing manager for an online company, there are many metrics, channels and segments which give a clear view of their return so it’s incredibly despairing when agencies attempt to position social media as if it will print money. It won’t because social media doesn’t necessarily fit with channels like PPC, Affiliates & SEO. Dena went on to give an overview of some of the free & paid applications for measuring social media for a specific brand or trend. She also advocates taking baby steps, failing fast but small, learning quickly and improving your technique – makes sense to me.

Next up was Des Byrne, owner of L’Onglex which is a nail polish remover whose brand I’d certainly seen mentioned through social media before. Des give a good honest overview of where the business was at and in particular insight into their use of social media. Blogging, Twitter and Facebook are the main tools L’Onglex apply, stats below.

These stats of course pose a few more questions, Des himself had one of being uncertain of how to measure direct traffic to his site. As he’s using Google Analytics it would be worth setting a baseline and looking at New vs Returning Visitors (in particular for direct traffic) as well as segmenting social media. It can get obsessive very quickly when using analytics, but my advice would be to set up a good overview report and some smaller segmented ones – Automate them by email and forget about it. Analytics should only ever be used for trend analysis, and with relatively low traffic, L’Onglex would gain more from looking at weekly rather than daily reports. Des also asked some great questions around the value of fans on Facebook where he is using paid advertising to lure his target market in with freebies. Some of which are hiding updates and don’t engage.

Finally, in a dapper suit that Jamie Redknapp would be proud of was Stephen O’Leary from O’Leary Analytics. I love my stats and I’m a firm believer that we should be able to measure anything digital. If we can’t measure it, how do we know if we’re improving? Stephen didn’t disappoint and gave a run through of measuring social media for SuperValu so far this year.

Stephen also went on to segment this into positive/negative mentions as well as male/female bias. How’s that for detail? All data collected originated from Ireland. Details on the coverage SuperValu are receiving is quite surprising considering they don’t actively do anything significant online, apart from a rather static website.

Following from that was a group task to rectify this and capitalise on the potential that a massive offline brand can have online. The key thing here I think is to put the brand back in control of their news output, building interaction with customers through social media and creating a connection between the offline store and online website. Something similar to idea’s I’ve had on bookshops.

Overall the main questions raised from me are relatively basic but would determine the definition of success for the use of social media. Those in attendance came from diverse business areas, all of which would be looking at social media from a very different point of view, be that business owners, marketers, agencies or just enthusiasts. What is Social Media? Where Does It Fit? How Do We Measure It?

I’m going to try and answer these over the next few posts.

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