The social media scorecard
As we all know, what we cannot measure, we cannot optimize. As a director of emerging and creative strategy, I am often tasked with formulating measurements to validate and support our clients' social media initiatives. Those of you working in the social media space know that it can be very difficult to provide the type of concrete metrics that our clients are used to getting from other interactive advertising channels (search, behavioral etc.). That said, quantification of marketing in social channels is not impossible. It may, however be very different, and somewhat challenging.
Because of the inherent difficulty of quantifying the results of social marketing efforts, I have been spending a lot of time with our social media team developing a scorecard to not only help gauge user activity, but to also make sense of the data and use it to learn how to improve future efforts. We have built a template that tracks all inputs into social environments (content) as well as outputs (comments and conversation). We have developed a systematic way to bring the lowest common denominator of many social environments to the forefront, so that friends, followers, fans, etc., can be tracked as one entity. By aggregating very granular metrics in order to create higher level metrics (buzz, engagement, etc.), we are able to tell a meaningful story.
Conclusion
The interactive marketing space continues to change at an exponential rate. One of the fundamental changes that have occurred is the shift away from point-to-point communications to a multi point, conversation economy. Central to this shift is the way in which content is syndicated (RSS) and the ease with which consumers can pass along information and talk freely about it.
While the mainstream still does not explicitly utilize RSS to get content and create conversation, it is central to all of our social lives online (knowingly or unknowingly). Understanding new models of syndication/distribution is central to a marketer's ability to create consistent brand presence across the social web. Strategic brand identity syndication must be part of every modern marketing initiative.
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Adam Broitman is director of emerging and creative strategy at Morpheus Media.
