Crowdbooster is the latest in social media marketing measurement dashboards and helps users identify what content is resonating and when. More than just providing numbers to users, Crowdbooster performs analysis and data mining to come up with insights that explain the best time to post content and how far the messages reached. What results is a color-coded graph that explains, “How are my tweets doing?”

The various dots provide more details: the higher up on the y-axis, the more impressions the tweet received; the farther right on the x-axis, the more retweets a tweet received; the larger the circle, the more replies. Hovering over a particular dot provides additional insights to the reach of a specific tweet:

Once a Twitter account has been in the Crowdbooster system long enough for it to measure a user’s patterns, the dashboard provides insights on the best time to schedule tweets:

On Fridays, Crowdbooster also recommends other users who might be worth a Follow Friday (#FF) mention for being your top retweeters and “mentioners” for the week:

Crowdbooster offers users the opportunity to link up to three accounts for free (paid users can link up to 10) and also offers a subscription to a weekly digest of activity, which recaps each account’s updates for the week: the change in followers, number of retweets, number of @ mentions and best tweet that week by impressions.

With any analytics tool, however, there are a few things that should be taken with a grain of salt. Crowdbooster provides a list of a user’s “most influential” followers, who are, in theory, the users who could have the biggest impact on overall visibility. However in taking a look at my most influential followers, Barack Obama is at the top of the list:

True, of all of my followers, Obama has the highest follower count – but the likelihood of him actually seeing my tweet and responding or retweeting? Slim to none.

The other issue to note is how Crowdbooster calculates a particular tweet’s reach – by taking the number of a user’s followers and adding it to the followers of the users who retweet or respond. A simple calculation, but likely not accurate because every follower is not reading every tweet that crosses his or her tweetstream. In any case, the stats are still useful for seeing how many retweets and replies a tweet received, which can allow users to make assumptions about how far a message reached relative to others posted.

Crowdbooster continues to improve its service and has plans to roll out a full reporting suite as well as a Facebook analytics dashboard. For now, the site is in beta and available to users by invitation-only (request an invitation here).

All three brands have realized, in Kris Narayanan’s words, that “social media isn’t a playground; it’s a viable option for brands to communicate” and they’ve made it a priority. General Mills now spends about five percent of its marketing/communications budget on social and PepsiCo has increased its social spend to 30 percent across all brands, with some brands entirely devoting their budget to social (not surprisingly, Julie shared that the Pepsi Refresh budget was 60  percent social).

Surely these brands must have nailed ROI to secure this type of funding in their organization’s finite budgets, right? They must have created a set of KPIs that  received buy-in from across company? Not so fast.

All agreed that regardless of their budget growth they ALL still struggle when connecting metrics with ROI. To increase support for social within their organization and unlock budgets, the panelists all recommended finding and promoting “business value” anecdotes combined with metric progress overtime.

So what does this look approach look like? Here are examples from each brand:

• General Mills – When the company launched their Fiber One bars they relied heavily on influencer placements like getting the products into the hands of Hungry Girl. Her comment that the bars “were better than Snickers” to her community of one million readers sparked online conversation and General Mills mapped the pulse and sentiment of conversation with the pulse of sales – finding that social conversations were the #2 driver of purchases. David Witt was able to take this anecdote combine it with cost deflection metrics for paid media and show that YES, social media is working.
• Samsung – A majority of Samsung’s social media metrics are based on conversation and sentiment within the conversations. When Samsung.com relaunched last year with more social features it was able to show that engagement increased by 200 percent, while online conversations about the brand increased and sentiment improved over the same time.
• PepsiCo – Try to ignore this anecdote – more people voted in Pepsi’s Refresh project than the presidential election. But the Pepsi Refresh project unlocked business value through more than votes – the positive brand sentiment ignited through word of mouth discussions was where the real payoff came. In another story from Julie Hamp, Brisk and Hess teamed with Foursquare to have buy one get one @Brisk for check-ins at point-of-sale. The test showed that sales increased 141 percent. Yes, social is working.

What I loved about these anecdotes is that these companies aren’t measuring by number of followers on Twitter or number of fans on Facebook. They’ve found quantifiable ways to link their activities to business results through correlations to sales and cost deflection – albeit not a perfect science, but it’s on its way. Most importantly they also look beyond the numbers to find qualitative examples of how they’re changing customer perceptions and building relationships.

What anecdotes have you uncovered through your social media program? What impresses your executives? What falls flat? Would love to discuss this in the comments.

The Council of PR firms will be sharing a podcast of the session – we’ll link to it as soon as it’s available.

Twitpic via @MusaTariq

It’s easy to make the assumption that your blog is failing when you’re receiving few comments. But don’t forget, Forrester classifies social media users into six “profiles” based on their behaviors online, and the vast majority fall into the “spectator profile,” where they are consuming social media content, but not yet commenting or creating their own content.

This data tells us measuring the number of comments may not be the best metric for determining the success of your blog. Don’t assume no one is reading your blog just because there isn’t a steady stream of comments. It could simply mean you could have more readers who fall into the spectators’ profile.

Still unsure whether you should continue to blog? Before you throw in the towel:

Revisit your goals

What were your objectives when you built your blogging strategy? It probably wasn’t to get a boatload of comments. For example:

• Was it to start a conversation with potential customers? Look beyond the comments. Are sales and marketing teams sharing posts with their prospects and having subsequent discussions via e-mail or in person?
• Was it to drive traffic to other corporate Web sites or content? Look at your site’s Web analytics. How much traffic is being driven from the blog?
• Was it to establish your executive or company as a thought leader on a specific topic? Look for message resonance. Are other blogs or media linking to your posts or including your commentary? Is sales or marketing receiving more customer inquiries on this specific issue?

Remember: the numbers are just part of the story

While Google Analytics data for your blog is just one element you should consider, there are some key figures to weigh more heavily in your decision:

• Is there steady growth? While overall visitor numbers are important, track your traffic over time and look for steady improvements. Steady growth is obviously an indication of your blog building a readership.
• Who’s reading? By taking a close look at IP data for your visitors, you may be able to get a better picture of who’s reading your blog. For example, the majority of readers are from a specific region or country that is important to your business or the blog is being read by someone at a specific prospect’s location.
• Are people coming back? When looking at traffic numbers, unique visitors is usually the first place your eye is drawn, but don’t overlook returning visitors. How many people like the content enough to come back? Map that to their IP address and you have an even better picture of who finds your blog appealing.
• What posts are getting the most traffic? Data on the posts that are getting the most readers should be used as a tool to create future content. What about this post made it the most read? Was it multimedia post? Did it have more links to relevant content? Was it about a controversial topic?
• What keywords are driving people to the blog? This data helps you understand how people are finding your blog. If the majority of people are coming to your blog because they searched for health care reform as opposed to digital records management, be sure you’re creating more content focused on the larger reform topic or strategically using that keyword to keep people coming back.

Analyze your content/activities

After a refresher on your goals, spend some time looking at your posts, SEO and promotional activities to ensure your execution matches your intent:

• Have all your posts been about company news or products? If you wanted to create a platform for thought leadership, you may want to adjust your approach and see if you get a stronger response.
• Have you used SEO tactics in your posts? Strategic placement of keywords, metatags and links make your content more discoverable and help point readers to specific sites.

Don’t forget to promote it

Unfortunately the “if you build it, they will come” philosophy doesn’t apply to blogging. To generate awareness of your blog you should be putting just as much effort into promoting it as you are building your pipeline of content.

For each post you write, try to incorporate links to posts from other relevant and influential bloggers. They will see your posts in their trackbacks and will likely investigate your blog further and possibly link to it – making their readership aware of your blog. Also, be sure to identify other posts on your topic where you can make an interesting comment linking back to your blog for more on your perspective. Lastly, don’t forget the power of making your network on other social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, familiar with your blog. By teasing your posts in status updates on your Fan Page or tweets from your corporate account, you are putting the link to your blog in the hands of people you know are interested in your perspective. Facebook and Twitter also serve as an excellent platform for link sharing.

Ask your target audience/readers

Consider going straight to your target to get their opinion on the progress of your blog. This insight can help you tailor your approach if you decide to continue or help you understand why it may be time to quit blogging:

• Publish a post on your blog that asks your readers for their feedback. What do they like about the site? What do they want to see more or less of? What are some of their other favorite blogs?
• Outreach to someone you’re targeting who might not have seen the blog before. What do they think? Do they find it interesting, entertaining or useful?

Before you quit, I recommend applying some of the insight you learned in your analysis for another month. Ideally, you will have a stronger set of metrics to benchmark against and will see a marked improvement in the progress toward the goals you established when you started blogging.

This exercise will ensure you don’t make a hasty decision to shut down your blog. However, a corporate blog even with the best execution is not going to be the solution for every PR challenge. Know that it’s ok to move on if you continue to find that this tactic is not helping you meet your objective or your priorities or resources change.

Have you thought about abandoning your corporate blog? What did you do? What was the deciding factor?

]]> http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/12/measuring-success-is-it-time-to-quit-your-corporate-blog/feed/ 3 http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/11/what-pr-professionals-need-to-know-about-web-analytics/ http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/11/what-pr-professionals-need-to-know-about-web-analytics/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:29:17 +0000 Nils Mork-Ulnes http://text100.com/hypertext/?p=616 If your reaction to the headline was, “what on earth does Web analytics have to do with my job?” you probably weren’t alone. Web analytics might be thought of as the realm of SEO pros and online marketing teams, but it can be an incredibly valuable tool for PR teams too. In fact, Web analytics can give you insight into the value of PR and the types of business outcomes it helps drive in a way that hasn’t been possible without expensive primary research. In much the same way, online advertising has revolutionized how advertisers can measure and optimize outcomes, PR can leverage exactly the same tools and techniques. As communications becomes increasingly more digital, it also becomes increasingly important to measure actual user behavior and optimize campaigns to get the best outcomes.

Here are some examples of questions that Web analytics can help you answer:

• Is our corporate Twitter account driving traffic to the right Web pages?
• Are our press releases or social media releases being cited by journalists and bloggers, and if so, do they drive traffic to our corporate site?
• Is Key Message A more effective at driving sales than Key Message B?
• Should we invest more resources in social or traditional media?
• Where do we find the audiences most likely to respond to our campaigns?

While some of these questions require advanced analysis and statistics, there are many straightforward questions you can ask your internal Web analytics team for data on:

• For starters, get some data on what unpaid sites drive the most traffic to your Web site. Unpaid traffic includes any Web sites that provide a link to you for which you have not paid (i.e., not ads or paid search). Many of these sites are influential publications that publish content about your brand, so you should know who is most effective at driving awareness and demand.
• Next, ask questions about what the traffic that these sites refer looks like. Do they tend to sign up for information or buy things on the Web site (or to put in Web analytics speak: “how well do they convert?”). Where are they located geographically? What keywords did they use to find the information, if any (this is great input into determining how you should write copy about your company)?
• Then you may want to do some benchmarking. How does earned media compare to paid media? How does Twitter compare to blogs?

Your internal Web analytics team should be able to provide you some of these reports out of the system or provide you or your analyst of choice access to the application. You can also talk to your agency or research vendor who can help answer your questions on how to get started. We frequently get asked by clients to do this and also help answer complex questions such as: what messaging results in more sales? Where are the untapped audiences with the most potential? Which audience segments should you target with various messages to get optimal business outcomes? There are many ways you can use the data to give you campaign insights, and if you combine it with other data sources, the possibilities are vast.

For more information on the subject of how to get started using Web analytics for PR, you should also take a look at this presentation, which Context Analytic’s Seth Duncan gave at IPR’s Measurement Summit recently:

94% of touch points in today’s “last click model” are thrown away and not given any credit for a sale.

- Esco Strong, Director, Microsoft Advertising Institute

Rob Birgfeld over at SmartBlog on Social Media has a good post on why ROI as measured by the last click – the last click before a sale – is a fundamentally flawed model. (See Live from Ad:Tech — The Myth of the “Last Click”).

Citing findings presented at Ad:Tech by Esco Strong, Rob goes on to note that “social media engagement — done the right way — can and will continue to affect customer perceptions of your brand.”

I couldn’t agree more. Let’s expand on that. Assigning nearly all monetary value to the last click basically assumes that nothing else influenced a purchase except that last action. In short, that’s absurd.

Microsoft Advertising Institute’s study notes that “users interact with an average of 2.2 other ads from the same brand over two days before the conversion.”

Let’s take that a step further and imagine that the same people eventually clicking on ads and purchasing are also consuming lots of information from their own peers and others through social networks, blogs, forums and even (gasp) traditional media.

So while people might be interacting with 2.2 other ads before the last click, there’s a great deal of opinion-sharing and perception-shaping that happens completely independent of those ads. An ad might be the digital channel that eventually takes me to the point of sale but in most cases I wouldn’t even be clicking on that ad unless I’d first gotten an opinion from someone I trust.

Pure visibility still matters a lot – this isn’t a diss to advertising. But consider “high-involvement” purchasing decisions – say, buying a cell phone – and the amount of thought people put into those decisions. A single interactive ad isn’t going to just whisk you through the entire thought process to the point of sale. If you’re spending any time online these days, odds are that someone else (an actual human being) influenced your purchase in some way.

For example, we’ve done some work with clients that points to notably higher conversion rates for traffic referred by social media and blogs compared to paid search. As the ability to better connect social media to metrics like conversion rates continues to evolve, I think we’ll begin to have a much more sophisticated and measurable view of influence over the purchasing decision…certainly more than the last click.

Joseph Kingsbury

twitter.com/jkingsbury

 Tom’s view:

But be careful what you wish for this is a Pandora’s box. With social media metrics you have to agree on what those numbers should be. What is an acceptable number of YouTube views for that “viral” video you made? What is the value of those 10 re-tweets? How many pageviews is great?

Completely agree with Tom’s take here. Let’s take that further: even if a client agrees with you on the value of, say, a re-tweet, that “value” is still removed from bottom line ROI. Values for page views, video views, etc. are all derivative unless they’re mapped to actual business metrics.

Focusing on outcomes that clients understand and pay for (i.e. leads, sales) is more valuable than just focusing on outputs (eyeballs). In some of our early client work in this area, we’re already finding that “earned media” can be more effective than “paid media” in driving outcomes such as conversions to actual sales, so the greater measurability of outcomes can be a good thing for PR. That’s a positive sign, especially since those results are before any campaigns – whether social media, traditional media or both – have been optimized for targeting influencers and driving conversions among specific audiences.

Likewise, I think this progression will ultimately be better for the audiences our clients want to reach since campaigns will be less focused on blanketing people with marketing information and more on facilitating useful interactions. Same trend has been happening in advertising for a while – that’s nothing new.

Every discipline’s wasted spend will gradually be exposed (just wait until TV ads become performance-based) but in a world of information overload and endless media content, real influence matters that much more. I’d assert that PR has as good or better an opportunity to own the business of influence…IF we get ahead of understanding metrics and mapping PR to bottom line outcomes.

Anyone in the PR industry who simply assumes they’ll change fast enough or that metrics won’t pose major challenges probably isn’t paranoid enough…

Joseph Kingsbury

Photo credit: http://team-mashed.com/e107_plugins/autogallery/Gallery/Paranoia!.jpg