Knowledgeistics

Posts Tagged ‘social media strategy’

One of the hot-button issues in the social media community continues to be whether and how you should use metrics to judge the effectiveness of social media.  This is a critical issue for social media experts (because it is their ticket into companies or up the corporate ladder) and a critical issue for companies, who need to judge an investment in social media in terms of opportunity cost.

I jumped into this hornets’ nest.  Ben Foster argues that social media metrics may delay action and cost your company leadership position in an emerging channel.

What is clear is that the social media community does not lack for metrics that can be applied to social media efforts.  However, what is missing is a discussion on what the right metrics are.

The right place to start is by understanding your company’s goals for social media, starting with the end in mind.  The social media community has a menu of possible and realistic goals for your social media efforts.  If you have already spent a ton of money on social media programs and are just now thinking of how to measure the results, you are behind.  This is how metrics like followers on twitter become germane — because you have come to a point where you need to set metrics that you can achieve.  (Just Google “gain twitter followers” — if twitter followers are the social media currency, this market is seeing hyper-inflation.) It’s comparatively easy for social media experts to create pageviews or followers — that is why they are experts.

One easy method for setting social media metrics: set metrics that are intrinsically valuable for your organization. If you head up a consumer insights department, your metric may be actionable consumer data.  If you are marketing tampons, maybe you want to drive sampling. Your social media metrics should almost always be external to the world of social media — not pageviews or twitter followers, unless your goal really is to increase your brand’s presence among social media experts.