Measuring Social Media Behavior – How?
I have been chewing on this for some time and is partially the reason why I have chosen to attend SOMA, because I want to really understand this, and I have also grown cold to much of the empty advice out there, along with all the spam I get promising me that I can “Use Twitter to make Millions Today!” or “From Facebook to Your Checkbook in 30 minutes!”, (Yuck, I am making myself sick.)
So, I was happy to see this important subject on our agenda in class last week, and we began dissecting this idea, and will further this week.
The session started off with a truism; “What you can measure you can manage, and what you can manage get’s done.” Obviously, we know that. To be effective as a social media consultant, more is needed than just getting 1,000’s of people on your wall, page views, video downloads, popularity rankings, or the number of DM’s you get each day. It’s about measuring personal interactions, what method of user-generated content is working and which isn’t, then adjusting. Online consumer response and market interaction is much more dynamic than the old school ways of SEO, they just don’t work. (BTW: clarification – SEO and social media – not the same thing)
One key I would like to talk about that we discussed was that as a social media consultant we orchestrate (not ‘manage’) social engagements. We are just the orchestrator, we don’t play an instrument, nor make any music, that is all done by others. One way to orchestrate a social engagement is by getting involved with people in social media forums, monitor what they talk about, participate and promote a subject if you agree, share any tips or suggestions you may have to help them. Another key element is find out where others are ‘hanging out’ and then go there, again getting involved, participating with your audience, talk about things they are interested in, support and promote them and their ideas.
I did a test to see how this might work. I kept it very simple so I could really make sure this worked. I used Twitter as my guinea pig. Here’s what I did:
- First, I let all my friends know I got accepted to SOMA, I even sent them a url to the semester agenda so they would know what we were going to learn. (most of my friends are also interested in social media, if not far more evolved in their understanding that I already)
- I told them as soon as class started I would do two things, I would share practical points here on my blog (like a diary here at redvwbus) and that I would notify via twitter that it has been posted.
That’s it. Now the class semester started last Friday, January 23, 2009. What measures have I been able to see? See for yourself. Here is a snapshot from a favorite tool, TwitterCounter…
Not to bad. But, I wanted an even more accurate measurement of my social engagement exercise. Not, was this sending traffic to my blog, but more precisely, was social media or SOMA, the engagement point? That would narrow it down and really help me to put some solid numbers together. So, I examined my blog posts and matched the activity to my posts. Here is what I found…
Aha! Now I could track (and now measure – not guess or ‘theorize’) that my tweets on this specific subject, regarding specifically social media, were proven by examining user engagement on my blog posts and which topics spiked their interest with a tool called SM2 (which allows me to monitor discussion, analyze threads, gauge content tone, and even emotion of response – “Thanks Kevin!”) . Very cool!
This is just one very simple example. But for social media consultants, “Cash Is King” and we have to prove our efforts are paying off for our clients. No matter what tools you use to analyze what you are doing, you still have “to do it”. These three principles (call them what you want) are all you need to remember and are completely scalable to any size enterprise:
- Network – go where the people are, join, be proactive, make connections with people
- Share – share your feelings, opinions, ideas, anything
- Publish – don’t sit on the sidelines, initiate conversations, contribute to a discussion, if you liked someone’s comment or review, say so
I hope this long rant was of some value, many have been asking me this same question and DM’ing me about it, so here you go. This will take effort, but it will help you as a social media consultant to make sure your efforts (the one the company is paying you money for) are hitting the bull’s-eye. If not, be flexible, adjust your efforts and keep fine tuning all your social media related activities to you and your clients success. Next class is this Wednesday, I’ll keep all you orchestrators posted!
Follow Tim for all the latest on this subject here on our blog and on Twitter, his social media think tank BrainStorm, or email him at tim@perspectiveim.com
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