My client wants me to increase their Facebook fans by 40 per cent next year but are going to invest the same amount into Facebook as they did this year. How do I tell them that this is not a realistic KPI?

This is a question I get asked often. My answer typically is:

Tell me more about how their Facebook fan numbers will impact the client’s business? Are they planning on investing in some F-Commerce development? How will this make them money?

I must admit to being from the David Ogilvy school of thought: “We sell or else”. The measurement of success for us must be that we help our clients sell. Sure, the sell could be an idea rather than a product sometimes, but ultimately, our clients’ businesses exist to sell.

Welcome to capitalism.

In my experience the easiest way to work this out is to clarify some times:

• Metric – a set of figures or statistics that measure results (Oxford) or stuff that can be measured
• KPI or Key Performance Indicator – a metric or indicator that measures the success or failure of a business activity, it can be a strategic or tactical in nature. (As defined by me based on the Wikipedia entry): stuff that can be measured that really affects your business performance.
• In short, a KPI is a metric but not all metrics should be a DKa metric doesn’t have to be a KPI.

If our the objective for an organisation is to Sell More Stuff (SMS) or make money then we have to make the KPIs things that are impact your bottom line. This can be:

1. sales and leads
2. percentage defects
3. mean time to repair
4. brand preference
5. prompted and unprompted awareness and
6. the list goes on.

This is more important than the number of fans. However, as discussed in a previous post, the number of fans matters. But it should be a diagnostic metric, rather than a KPI.

Diagnostic metrics are the metrics tell you roughly where potential issues are and they can be the levers that you can pull to tune  campaign peformance.

To get to the KPI get as close to the revenue streams as you can. Generally, my preference in descending order is:

1. Revenue attributable to social
2. Leads attributable to social
3. Referrals
4. Share of positive voice
5. the list goes on.

And for the KPI, just pick one. I’ve seen lists of 10 KPIs and it’s totally unmanageable, unfocused and not a very good use of resources (budget or otherwise). On the other hand I might track a bunch of diagnostic metrics like fans, followers, retweets and comments. When 10 of these are woven into a picture, they become a very good indicator on campaign or program health. But they don’t necessarily change the business. You could have 1,000,000 followers but if they contribute nothing to your bottom line then is it really a key indicator of your business performance?

To clients who read this I say keep your agency honest and keep them working for your business. Make us earn our keep.

To colleagues who have clients asking about Facebook Fan numbers as KPIs, talk them through and find out what their real objectives are. I’ll leave you with David Ogilvy’s “We Sell or Else” call to arms.

It may well be the thing that makes the Jetson-esque floating cars a reality. Check out the video to see it in action.

Okay so in my previous post I contradicted “conventional wisdom” or at least one of the so-called “rules” of social media. Who’s heard of this one?

It’s not the quantity of fans that matter, it’s the number of engaged fans

That’s nice. It really is lovely. It sounds good. It absolves the social media guru from actually committing to fan numbers without actually saying so, but it also allows these people to chant as a mindless mantra in social media hippie guru land. Here are five reasons why they matter:

1. Quantity is a key factor to reach. Who would you prefer to be Starbucks with 26MM+ fans or Joe Blow’s cafe with 26? If about 10% of your updates actually reach your fans who has a better chance of hitting more fans?
2. Your CEO measures the success on Facebook by the number of fans
3. For technology products, the larger the pool available is for peer support
4. The larger your community is the higher the likelihood is that you will have a good cross section of the community to use in product development and fault detection
5. The larger your community the larger the number of supporters that can be rallied to support you in the event of a crisis

Does that mean that higher numbers are better in every scenario? No. Does that mean that you should measure the success of every campaign based on the numbers of fans acquired. Absolutely not.

What I’m saying is it’s critical that you think about the objectives of each social media campaign you go into and consider whether or not Facebook fan numbers could be a factor and not mindlessly follow these so-called “rules”.

If you hear someone say: “Fans & follower numbers don’t matter” on a social media blog, CLICK AWAY IMMEDIATELY. This is the exact type of social media guru platitudism (yes that’s a word) you don’t need. Fans & follower numbers MATTER.

Now that I’ve started by being contentious, let me explain.

Most of the time, if you ask a client / marketing director / CEO what the objective of the campaign is, the answer is almost universally

Sell More Stuff (SMS)

Of course it is. If you’re:

• an automotive company you want to… sell more cars
• a FMCG you want to… sell more toothpaste, food, etc…
• a politician you want to… sell more votes

The list goes on.

There are multiple reasons why this objective is not useful but fundamentally, it’s too big an objective and it’s not specific enough. For example, you can SMS by optimising your supply chain so that you can actually make enough units to meet demand. That has nothing to do with your social media campaign.

So whenever my guys tell me that the client says the objective is to SMS, I say to them, dig deeper.

And by digging deeper I want them to ask these questions:

1. Who’s product / issue targeted at?
2. What are the demographic / psychographic / personas who we are trying to motivate?
3. What is it we want them to DO? This one is important. Spell out the next physical action we want them to take.
4. What’s their current attitude?
5. How are the social elements going to be woven into the campaign?
6. Where do these people hang out? Physically, and online.

Once you know this information, setting an objective will be much easier and you will be able to see how your objectives for social media channels fit in to the overall picture and whether they can actually become the overall campaign objectives.

When I have this information I will often go away to do some additional desk research. I may use a listening tool to get an indication as to what’s happening out there. I may rely on research from a research house or tap my own networks for people who work in different parts of the company.

Once I have this information I take myself away from my desk and literally just stare into the distance for a bit and digest and distill the information. When the thinking is done, usually I come back with an objective that looks like this:

We will increase preference for Brand X amongst Young Women aged 18-24 by 15% in the next three months

By framing the objective this way, we can now set out to achieve it and ultimately serve the wider business/capitalist objective of SMS.

More importantly, you can measure it beyond the platitudes of “Generate buzz”, “starting a conversation” or heaven forbid “Engage our audience”.

This is the first in a series of posts regarding social media measurement.

The news is public now, so I figured I should announce it on my blog. I was offered a fantastic
opportunity to relocate to Hong Kong to work with the 360 Digital Influence regional team and I accepted!

I fell in love with Hong Kong pretty much the moment I stepped off the plane on my very first business trip there in 2008. It’s an exciting mashup of east and west, it’s a little like me .

Professionally it’s especially appealing because it means I am smack bang in the middle of Asia where there is still enormous growth and there are also 14 individual markets with different language, custom and culture.

More info soon but for now it’s a flurry of activity to get packed and ready before I fly out in a couple of weeks!

Thumbnail image courtesy of Steve Carney

agency land is this frenetic ebb and flow of fast and slow. lately it’s been fast, extremely fast. the thirst for social media still grows unabated.

clients are getting more sophisticated with their needs and it has meant that at work we’ve been hiring at a cracking pace.

unfortunately that means that this pixel of the web goes untended. and the original horror at the decline of my UMVs dwindled to disgust to loathing to indifference and now it’s back to resolved.

so again, i will make the effort to update.

i have no excuse really. it’s not like i have to be coaxed for an opinion. i once had feedback on my performance appraisal that stated “jonathan has an opinion on everything.” which is true (in my defense it did follow up with “…but he’s willing to listen to everyone else’s as well.”)

and it’s not like i don’t have a preference for writing. i do.

it comes down to time and creative energy. during the week this might be difficult, but on a day like today, kicking back at one of my favourite cafes, there should be no excuse.

it just has to be done because i’d like my non-existent children to have feet.

i love this commercial. it’s a great creative concept, well executed. i’m not sure if it’ll sell more volkswagens but it’s definitely talkable, memorable and most importantly shareable! 9 million views and still counting.

first of all, location based services have utility. i’m not talking just about the coupons and deals you can get on foursquare (and soon to facebook places). i’m talking about knowing where your friends or family members are. for kristen foursquare saved her life. my friend josh uses facebook places checkins to let his friends know which pub his at on a pub crawl. i personally like using both of those services to get tips and leave tips for other people. it’s especially when you land in a new city and need to know the best place for some r&r.

the key to utilising these services effectively is maintaining control over your information, as i discussed with a journalist last week.

everything is public on the internet

the dogmatic privacy boffins would say that all information on the internet is public. to a certain extent they’re right, but you need to inject this with a health dose of realism as well. an analogy is using your credit card online. yes it can be dangerous, and if you card number gets stolen (particularly if it’s a visa/mastercard debit card) you could be out of pocket to large amounts of dollars, until such time as the bank returns it. but you take reasonable precautions and you’re probably more likely to have your card skimmed at an atm.

control is an illusion, you don’t really control your data

again, this is also true in some respects. facebook has in the past, and probably will in the future, change its policies or expose your data on purpose or by accident. no doubt foursquare could misstep in a similar form or fashion. my argument is rather than not use something that is truly useful, why don’t we put those energies into bringing control back? forcing developers to make secure applications and safeguard privacy policies? thousands drown each year, does that mean we should ban beaches and swimming pools or teach people to swim and train lifeguards?