…actually, not quite 5 years. In 2005 I joined Carmichael Lynch as a research specialist. Back then social media was a buzz word, Twitter still had the “track” feature and Facebook was just for college kids. Through the years I had the fortune to work with some great people to create some great work. The clients and people at CL are both top notch and will be missed. But this Friday will be my last day at Carmichael Lynch.

Next week I will be packing up my new car (I know, this still shocks some of my family/friends that I have a car) and will be heading South…to Dallas…yes, that’s Dallas, Texas. I know…here I was worried that I was moving to a non-snow state. But they just got 10 inches of snow there last week. So, I guess my new winter coat won’t go to waste after all. See, everything is going to be fine :)

In Dallas, I will be joining Matt Dickman at Fleishman-Hillard as Senior Vice President of Social Strategy. Though the decision to move South was a tough one, the opportunity to work with Matt and Fleishman-Hillard team/client roster was something that I could not pass up.

To my Minneapolis friends and family – you will be missed. Well, the -20 degree weather might not be missed but the art openings, soccer, broomball, board games, Irish pubs, beer tastings and Thanksgiving dinners will be.

Thank all over you for the laughs and great times over the last 5 years.

If you are ever in Dallas, much sure you stop by and say “howdy”.

Social Media – ROI, Value, Etc – It’s some sort of glue

I’ve been stepping back and looking at social media in a bigger picture context, and I think that is where you can prove value and ROI. As a stand alone project, social media’s ROI/Value can be difficult to prove to a CMO. “So, let me get this straight, by blogging you will increase my sales?” Now this in the thick of social media do have charts and graphs that can prove this… but it takes some digestion to get it (and having CMO’s actually participate to really get it). But if social media is part of a larger web presence for a brand/product – the value of why do it makes a lot of sense.

Organic Search/Search + Social Media
Reach + Social Media
Impressions + Social Media

In any of those contexts it gets much easier to explain the value/ROI of why you need social media involved in your web presence strategy.

This thing called the Web – No mom, that’s not just “another link”

Explaining what I do for work to anyone can at times be challenging. Explaining it to my mother is an art. One I have not completely mastered. But I will say, if you need to test any of your web ideas out…always run them past my mother. She will break your experience design without even trying. She’s brilliant like that and doesn’t even know it. Same with my father. May be the best usability testing team on the planet. But I digress ( I love saying that).

When I was trying to explain what I do the last time something really stuck with me. That the web is all activity or search, and that Web 2.0 is really about the activities we can do with the web. I know, I know…this is obvious to most of us. But not to my mother. And when you have to slow it down and explain it…that when we go to the web we are looking to “do something”, it makes a lot of sense that your web presence should be about an activity design, what do you what consumers to do where.

Leading by example – or, get out of the way

I’ve be dormant on the web presence/social media front for awhile. And I think the echo chamber has hit a point…put up or shut up. I sat down and looked at the projects I’ve done over the last 2 years. Some pretty cool stuff that I’m guessing nobody knows about. And some pretty cool things that never got done. It’s time to fail forward, fast.

Just a couple of things, rolling around in my head…

But because of my recent work in website design, working with design principles and IAs my thoughts around the topic have evolved into a couple of areas…which I’m still putting some thinking to…but here is what I’ve got so far. When it comes to social media measurement, its –

Activity vs. Media Value

…and it centers around how you approach your social media project. If its about an action, you measure the engagement/participation/activity you want someone to do. If its about selling it, you need a media value number. Now, both of these ideas can work together (and should) but the difference is in what you need as your end goal and why.

Activity

I’m calling it activity because you initial set out to design a social media project with people actively doing something (could also be called engagement/participation). But the entire project is built from the beginning to have a person actively do something with your content (information). So that is what you need to measure…and those metrics might need to be thought up to go with the project.

Media Value

These are more traditional online/offline metrics that everyone for the most parts understands. Impressions, CPM, time spent, etc. If you design your social media project to generate ‘X’ impressions that you can measure it against either an online media CPM or a PR dollar efficiency. But while this will help sell the project, might not sell the widgets for the brand.

For example – (i’m borrowing this from Bokardo, with his thoughts on activity-centered design…yes, this has been a decent influence)

If you design a social media project to have people ’shop’ (activity) in your store, then you would measure shopping. If you design a social media project to have people ‘visit’ your store, then use the metrics, because you just need them to stop by.

Ok, so maybe this is some obvious already discussed social media measurement thinking. But I just needed to get it out, give it a spin. I’m really in the camp of knowing what activity to drive and measure off of that.

Now, to turn this post is a little different direction – I was reading Beingpeterkim and borrowed his post on a framework for measuring social media and added/edited in a couple of other points. I think this is a good cheat sheet to get at social media measurement from a standardized POV. His bullet points with my additions (genius steals and I hope he considers this flattery)

Attention:  The amount of traffic to your content for a given period of time.  Similar to the standard web metrics of site visits and page/video views.

Engagement:  The extent to which users participate with your content in a channel.  Think blog comments, Facebook wall posts, YouTube ratings, widget interactions, passing content on.

Authority:  Ala Technorati, the inbound links to your content – like trackbacks and inbound links to a blog post or sites linking to a YouTube video.

Influence:  The size of the user base subscribed to your content.  For blogs, feed or email subscribers; followers on Twitter or Friendfeed; or fans of your Facebook page.

Sentiment: The impression/reaction the audience has of the brand/product after the interacting with your content. Good/bad sentiment.

Media Value: Total number of mentions/impressions of brand/campaign across all media outlets/channels (social media impressions vs. CPM to generate same impressions)

Now my water cooler discussions were more centered around the lofty ‘what is social media’ discussion…which I’m currently boiling down to – social media is just content and should be treated as such (I do think it is more than that, but for space/arguement on the blog…running with that this morning). After reading through several of the linking posts on the best practices meme, ended up with a couple of favorites that I think are related to what I think is a best practice for social media…or a starting place for a social media game plan.

When I first started advising team members and clients on social media I recommended a strategy to do one of two things for consumers in social media land. We needed to either 1) give consumers something to talk about or 2) a place for consumers to say something (ok, you could/should do both).

I felt that running with this strategy would lead brand stakeholders to a wide range of tactics…with the key being that they would now be at least participating with consumers in some form/function, which to me was key.

So after wading through some of the best practices posts, found a couple that I think relate to my thinking and either add to, evolve, or compliment it.

Jason Falls leads off with ‘embrace your audience‘. Which I twist to – know your audience (embracing to means know that you know your audience to a certain degree). This is a key foundation point…know who you are going to be participating with and what they want/like/feel/etc.

Beth Harte raises the point of ‘provide a platform‘. Give you consumers a place to chat, get them going. And I really like that she cuts to the chase and adds, “Why wait for those limited occasions?”. Lead your consumers with a place to chat if they don’t have one. And if they do, give them extensions there to help them talk.

And if they are well cemented with there own places to chat, then follow Kipp Bodnar advice and create value for your consumers. I would evolve that a tad and say, create value with them. Play the curator role and serve information/content for the discussions happening out there. Respond to issues that people are having and know when to peel back the certain and let your brand story out.

All these points I think can lead to a strong foundation strategy which then we can modify from client to client. To me, that is what leads to some of the social media best practices.

I know I need to embellish more on my initial thoughts that I think all social media is just content. I’ll try to get back to that soon…maybe after I’ve had my coffee this morning.

Maybe that is why I love my Ning(s).

And I don’t really want to get on someone bad side…and this is more a poke at social media enthusiasm than her. But really…you spent 9+ hours on a Saturday night making web 2.0 Easter Eggs? I mean…I just…I just shake my head. Was it better than my Saturday night…I’m not sure it is that tough of a call.

In my own observations, I think we have hit the tipping point within the general masses of people feeling comfortable blogging. For the sake or argument, I’m staying in the blogging world…I think this trend actually holds true across all consumer created content. I say this because the same girl who said that quote has just started blogging more on a regular basis. Her friends are the same way. I’ve noticed that co-workers who have teased me in the past about having a blog…have now started their own. They post fairly regularly – pics, videos, etc.

Fueling this I believe is the combination of several trends;

• Adoption of reading blogs has tipped – from journalist to my office mate who read 15 craft blogs a day
• Blogging is becoming accepted and is shedding the ‘only early adopters do that’ attitude
• Tools to blog, post pics, post video are now very simple
• People feel comfortable publishing

In an interesting spin, I think Facebook became the Trojan horse and catalyst for people to get into blogging. For the sake of argument lets say that Facebook is basically a personal content aggregator to all your friends. It opened the door to let a group of people know that you’ve been tagged in a photo. Mentally, this helps people get over the hump of having themselves published on the internet…and actually they think it is not that bad. But while Facebook is great for aggregating content, it doesn’t really have the ability to create content, allowing for people to express themselves beyond just a photo tag. Creating a simple blog does. For the 80% of 18-42 year olds who have broadband (rough summary/estimate from this emarketer report), blogging is now just another simple login. With news stories of people micro-publishing, a la twitter, the masses also get comfortable with the idea that they don’t have to publish the next great novel on their blog.

Given, this trend is all from the observation of space 967 on the 9th floor of 110 North 5th Street. But if my co-workers who just gotten into blog stick with it…we just might be on to something. We might be able to ladder this up and say this is part of a larger trend and that ‘08 will be about mass adoption of people creating their own content, growing the content creators past the 1-10% range…but that’s another blog post.

Update: Thank you Heather for the edits. 

Additional suggested reading (besides from my last social media ROI round post), ROI and what it can achieve -

Stepping back from tactics, what are we going to achieve? What will we effect? Earlier this year Tom from WME Blogs post Extending Forrester’s Blog ROI matrix explores benefit, metric value. I wish I would have seen this earlier, it would have helped with the question I was getting time and time again – why does social media matter again? A article from iMedia Connection: Keys to social media pairs with this to help start thinking how getting your plan going. Along similar lines is 7 Idea for Social Media and Business from Patrick Schaber at the Lonely Marketer. And for those clients/bosses who need it more black and white, Emergence Marketing does a great job laying it down to bare bones, ex:

The Viral Garden has another post I’m thinking I should just spam my office with, understanding the value of blogging. While it does get into Google Page Rank and other analytics, the most important part is that while numbers are nice – consumers are into conversations and we need to understand what value blogs bring as a community building tool. Laddering up, its not about being stone face company anymore – need to start living and breathing, need to start “communicating”.

But to put some real “numbers” to social media, Tom from MotiveQuest is working with Northwestern University to develop an Online Promoter Score. I think we’ll see more more tools like this in the near future. I like this idea of the Online Promoter score…but I wonder what is under the hood. I know from other studies last year social media and brand engagement were having a hard time correlating to market share and sales because of ‘chicken/egg’. Does sales lead to more social media/brand engagement or do social media/brand engagement lead to more sales? And is it strictly social media/brand engagement or was it a really good online marketing program, SEO program and offline promotion that drove chatter? (And honestly, I’m not sure we really should be separating chicken/egg).

Moving forward into 2008, I really see a breaking out of social media campaigns (if not happening already). I think the tipping point is just about here – broadband adoption(eMarketer.com), social media consumer usage(eMarketer.com), smart thinking on social media (Jeremiah Owyang). I mean if my mother found a blog...yours will too. What is making me nervous is when a blogging/wiki/flickr/social network gets mashed and dumbed down enough (no offense mother) for even my mother to use(eMarkerter.com). This social media thing might really take off…

Several people have been asking/chatting about Social Media ROI lately so I thought I would pull together some quick stats and links on the topic. To sum up, nobody has really broken the code and has been able to equate a number (impressions…yuck) to Social Media or WOM. And honestly, how could you/why should you.

I’m not sure I want to know a X value on my friendship and what we talk about. More so to the point, the age of conversation and how we measure don’t fit the old paradigms. Impressions, page views, etc are all built on a broadcast reach/frequency paradigm. For social media and WOM, we need to start thinking in what a conversation/engagement really mean to us (marketers/company/brand) and what that means to a consumer (real people). But here are some links to get going on the topic.

Online Communities and ROI

From a recent Online Community Business Forum, Joe Cothrel and Bill Johnston presented Online Community ROI

Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T, 2002)
- 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004).
- Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
- In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
- Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
- Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
- Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)

From the Forum One OC ROI Survey (April 2007):
- Only 22% of respondents had clear ROI Model
- 42% had staff of 1-5 people
- 49% Report Monthly to Mgmt
- Establishing ROI Model was a priority for most respondents in the near term

Blogging ROI

Forrester has an ROI of blogging report...might be good to track down.

Marketing ROI: Whims from Ron Shevlin has a great post digging the report. From his post -

GM’s first-year ROI on the blog was 99%. The primary contributors to the top line: 1) $180,000 in customer insight, which was estimated by assuming a cost of $15,000 for running a monthly focus group with 10 participants over the course of a year, and 2) $380,000 in press coverage, calculated by estimating the value of “high-visibility Web placements” and the cost of CPM advertising on sites like InformationWeek.

Social Media ROI

From the blogosphere, some must read on the topic -

Connie Bensen My Conversation Blog – was tagged in an ongoing pass along ROI discussion. Her post digs into both quantitative and qualitative variables on ROI measurement.

Rohit Barghava Influential Marketing Blog Guest Post: Is Word of Mouth a Discipline or Just a Channel? – Tackles some core issues of WOM

Brains on Fire – “As the engagement and involvement of your community – your passionate fans – increases, the less money you need” Awesome!

Conversation Agent ROI = Return on Involvement This is required reading!
Update: fixed Conversation Agent link. And here is another suggested link from Conversation Agent – Measurement and ROI for Social Media
(thanks Valeria for stopping by!!!)

First off is Cory Doctorow post on How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook. It touches on something I felt for awhile. Do I HAVE to friend you? Even if we are just work mutual friends? It worth the read and a good think.

Next up is Facebook’s Beacon. Matt Dickman does an excellent job breaking down what Beacon is and why it matters to marketers. I had been noticing this when somehow magically Facebook posted some recipes from epicurious.com. I didn’t notice it at first, but then it got kind of creepy. The Idea Shower (which I’m adding this blog to a regular reading list) does a great job explaining the situations behind Beacon and privacy issues.

Thing is, I agree with what these post share. Facebook is kind of overstepping its bounds for my taste. The ad guy in me wants data shared, really. But within good taste. On top of that, while I like Facebook, it really just doesn’t do it for me. I’m glad its there, but I kind of want to keep it at arms reach. I mean, I like being able to keep up with my friends. But…I kind of like being able to disappear from the social scenes every now and then as well.