Engagement vs. measurement
I went to a talk on measuring social media earlier this week, and was thoroughly disappointed. One of the things mentioned was that measurement should be built into the strategy of a social media campaign, to which my immediate thought was: you can have success metrics, but will people come to your site once it’s built? And then what happens to your forecast? I’m reading Groundswell at the moment so it may be a sort of ‘Groundswell hangover’, but the truth is that a project or campaign that is built for the client and not the people is looking at failure even before it launches. It may be the most beautiful Flash application ever created, but unless it brings value to the user, will they come the second time around, after looking at it once and murmuring ‘Oh, beautiful site’? So considering the metrics and having them as a guideline is good, but it is best not to have that as a benchmark of success.
Another issue that was mentioned was measuring interaction with a brand if it was not on the brand’s social media landing page. I’m not sure that’s even relevant. You may upload a video on your site, but you need to face the fact that thousands of people will find it on YouTube, and they may not visit your home site. If keeping it off YouTube is your solution, then think of all the lost opportunity. You cannot control what people do on the web. If they want to watch your video on YouTube or your presentation on Slideshare, then that’s where they will look for it.
Two thought-provoking things were mentioned though: one, that we need to be careful that measurement (or our obsession with it) does not kill innovation, and the second, that the language of digital measurement is quickly becoming the language of all measurement. I’m not quite sure about that last bit but I’ll leave it to bubble in my mind a bit.
I was interested when the panel discussed the 2 criteria that are important to consider while measuring the success of a social media campaign – the overall health of the brand it was created for (which is a long-term issue), and the effectiveness of the campaign itself (which is short-term). The overall health bit ties into what I said about benchmarking success earlier – overall health to a large extent is about engagement. I just heard about the Altimeter Group’s EngagementDB report, which effectively helps to measure the health of a brand (edit): via its engagement with consumers (thanks Mike!). It takes into consideration the number of digital touch-points with a consumer and the respective level of engagement within each channel. Bonus points were awarded for corporate/executive involvement because it meant that conversation with customers was a priority for the company.
Google Analytics will get us only so far. (Edit): Engagement will take over from there – and I’ll wager engagement is way more important an indicator of brand health than Google Analytics, which is probably a decent indicator of existence.