By Chris Lee

Businesses engaging in social media marketing often need to demonstrate value for money and impress senior management with graphical displays of social media success. To add to the complexity, measurement is not purely a question of return on investment, there is also the small matter of online reputation management, which cannot be measured in purely financial terms.

To make sense of social media measurement NMK spoke with Roger Warner, founder and managing director of Lewes-based online PR consultancy Content and Motion.

You’ve been concerned with measurement since the dawn of social media. Has any consensus been reached on best practice? If so, what is it?

I think there is generally more consensus about what matters in terms of results and that this is leading to more clarity on what should be measured.  Which is all for the better. The IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) recently re-published its measurement framework. I'd hold this up as good measurement practice because it focuses on actions and outcomes - like cost per impression, cost per engagement, cost per lead and cost per referral.  These are all yardsticks that experienced marketers are familiar with in traditional online planning.  So 'cost per X' enables us to plan and measure on an “apples and apples” basis versus traditional media spend.  And the data is now easier to get at as Facebook et al have improved to quality of their stats and analytics. See here for my view on the IAB paper.

How affective are monitoring tools like Radian6? Do they really save time over doing it yourself with free tools like socialmention.com and others, and how do those expensive tools shape up compared to lower cost options?

Radian6 and others like Brandwatch are super tools for reporting.  They're not so great for monitoring.  Reporting and monitoring are different requirements for a brand.  A report from a tool like Brandwatch has brand value over time - from month to month, measuring apples with apples once a report framework is set.  Monitoring on a daily basis requires a different tool set and a different talent in an analyst.  Our preference is to use tools with a better index for this kind of thing and to set up custom dashboards that aggregate feeds from a variety of sources - Google search, Social Mention, Twitter search, etc.

Monitoring requires daily quick views and fast actions.  Reporting is an “executive” requirement - to measure progress, share of voice, sentiment etc over time. Both outputs require an analyst to do good things with the data.  Tools and data alone are useless - they need to be turned into insight and action. 

With something like blogger relations and blogging, what’s best practice here?

We can still measure coverage and reactions and interactions in blog-based work in similar ways.  Key is to think about engagement metrics and distribution.  Blog coverage leads to a broader reach for a campaign.  Blog comments give you a good feel for impact of content. All these things can be collated via simple tools such as Google Alerts and search - for real time analysis and monitoring.  For reporting, and using the Brandwatch style tools, blogs will be covered as a standard output.

How does one assess the return on investment of a social media campaign, especially in the B2B space where long-term relationship building is key?

We would look to essential measurements like: lead generation (via web to lead forms and what shows up in a customer relationship management system), search visibility (what impact the work is having on a brand's Google footprint and how content is performing on site in terms of goals), and engagement of content (how it is being distributed, commented on and referenced).  Despite common wisdom, content-driven social PR campaigns are superb for B2B (business-to-business) campaigns.  We've doubled our results for firms like IBM, Autodesk, Ubiquisys, Executive Offices Group and others and our work here has been non-rocket science - just massively optimised and focused from a PR perspective.

What’s your advice to any firm just starting out in social media or they’ve already got a programme in place but no real direction on how to start monitoring and measuring?

Measure what you care for today.  Don't create new metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators).  Look at standard measurement points such as traffic, conversions, coverage (in the PR sense) and simple things like follower buildings.  The question to ask is how is your social PR work improving the results in these known domains.  This is the only way to earn the right to do more work in social.  Let's be honest, most new social media work is likely to be funded by a PR or ecommerce budget - therefore you have to measure initial success against metrics from these domains.  Once you've proved this base value then start to look at more progressive data points like cost per engagement, etc and then compare these things against your traditional marketing/online spend.  You might like what you see.