From a business perspective, how do we quantify the value of my time here at SXSW?

Adding a Bit of Color

There’s a lot of chatter about fuzzy metrics – those soft metrics, like the value of a conversation at a conference – that have value, but perhaps one value that is harder to define in a business sense.

Thinking of your measurement strategy as a picture, the hard metrics are the outlines: the big, black lines that form the overall picture and define what you’re really looking at.

The fuzzy metrics add color. Things like conversations at conferences, a shared meal, a round of golf or a few quips exchanged via Twitter – those are the items that add color and depth to your picture.

Showing share of conversation for your brand vs. your competitors is an important hard metric to track, but how do you break that share of conversation out to show the exact value one of those conversations has for your business?  Do you weigh conversations with people who are influential differently than conversations with people who have less of a direct tie to your business?

Including hard metrics in your measurement is necessary, and is a key way that many marketing, PR, or social media teams justify their existence to their C-suite.  But including the soft or fuzzy metrics are equally as valuable, especially as time moves forward and the soft metrics flow into the hard metrics. More often than not, the soft metrics give background, and are key indicators at the very start of trends or changes in your results.

Painting your Picture

My role as a Community Manager puts me on the very long tail of the sales cycle.  My job isn’t a lead generation job, but it is sometimes part of what my job entails.  My focus, though, is firmly in the land of fuzzy metrics.  I focus on the handshakes, the “Hello”s, the @ messages on Twitter, and the ability to connect either online or offline to provide information, solve a problem, or sometimes just show that there is a human on the other end of the line.

I may be on the long tail of the sales cycle, but the fuzzy metrics of how I connect with people still do matter in a very real way. They show how my role fits into our company in terms of helping awareness, driving sales, or even reducing customer support costs (to name a few). That handshake could be the start of a fruitful business relationship, so including fuzzy metrics in your measurement strategy often shows trends that the hard metrics only pick up after they’ve begun.

Framing your Artwork

As time passes, some of those handshakes or rounds of golf will turn into website hits or product inquiries.  Some of those inquiries or visits will turn into partnerships or sales, and that’s where things get interesting.

One of the most important things you can do is tie your measurement systems together, not necessarily through integrated systems (though that does help), but by correlating activities and trends to your metrics, and trying to clearly define and report on causation where applicable.

For example, if a salesperson notes that the person they’re speaking with first heard of your company from a conversation with a marketing rep at an industry event, that’s important to tie back into your measurement reports. Suddenly, those handshakes take on a different meaning, and if you’re trying to get buy-in from your C-suite, you have a few more proof points to rely on.

I’m sure you all have plenty of examples of how the fuzzy metrics have impacted your business. The comments are yours to share your stories.

Being a business owner himself, Brian approaches engagement and brand sustainability on the social Web from a standpoint of thorough accountability and depth of meaning. He emphasizes the responsibility and privilege businesses have to connect with and bring value to those who’ve established themselves in the online social space through social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. In turn, for a business to continue creating value for itself and its community, internal players must have the proper guidance to know exactly what it is they’re doing on the social Web, how they need to measure those initiatives, and how to report that information back to the people they work with.

In Engage!, Brian breaks down why businesses should get involved on the social Web and also provides the information you need to get started engaging in the right places and fostering the relationships you build so they become impactful to your organization.

So listen in as we talk with Brian next week, and if you have any questions for Brian beforehand, feel free to leave them in the comments and we’ll be sure to ask them during the Webinar. Calendar details and the registration link are below. We hope you can join us!

When: Friday, March 26th
Time: 10am PDT/1pm EDT
Register: Engage With Brian Solis

Photo courtesy of affiliatesummit.

Now, how do you measure reach? It might seem a little fuzzy at first, but these few metrics can provide a foothold in the practice of measuring how far your brand extends — and *how* it extends — out there on the Web.

1. Potential Reach

The most basic of all awareness metrics, looking at the numbers of fans, followers, or “eyeballs” is a pretty fundamental concept. But the more accurate way to look at numbers like this is as *potential* reach, as you’ll never have all of those people paying attention to you simultaneously. Take a look at other elements like peak usage time for specific sites and marry awareness metrics with actual engagement activity to get a closer ratio of potential vs. actual reach at any one time.

2. Mentions Per Time Period

The online equivalent of “impressions”, looking simply at how many times your brand is talked about online during a given time period can give you a sense of overall awareness and chatter. It can be interesting to segment this category of data overall, too, through lenses like “mentions by media type”, to see whether blogs or forums or mainstream media are carrying the bulk of conversation about your brand. And line up this metric with your targeted campaigns or engagement efforts, and get a sense of whether your work drives those numbers up, down, or not at all.

3. Inbound Links

The web analytics standby, inbound links are a solid indicator of the people that are not only aware of you, but are telling other people that they should be aware of you, too. Want to know where in social media you should be spending your time? Look at the sites and media types where the inbound links live to get a sense of the types of media that are driving consistent attention for your brand. And to get some insight into how people refer to you and think of you, pay attention to the anchor text folks use when they create those links, and see if they’re using the terminology to describe your work that you hope they are.

4. Share of Conversation

Share of Voice is a familiar concept, looking at how much you’re mentioned or covered in comparison to, say, the competition. but Share of Conversation measures something a bit more helpful: how often you or your company are mentioned in context of the conversations that are most relevant to you. In other words, if you want to be a leading document management company, how often are folks talking about you when they’re talking about their document management needs? For a bit more detail about how to calculate and measure Share of Conversation, read Marcel Lebrun’s post.

5. Subscribers to Content

Related to potential reach, number of subscriptions can function as both an awareness and an engagement metric. Whether you’re talking email subscribers, blog subscribers, or even subscribers to your print publication, subscriptions represent conscious interest in your content and a focused group of potential reach for that media. And while you often depend on provided “reach” or impression numbers given to you by third parties for advertising placements or the like, subscribers is a number that’s directly attributable to your own content and impact.

6. Referral and Recommendation Ratio

This metric really ends up in the camp of engagement, too, as well as sales. But from an awareness point of view, it can be valuable when looking at the value of increased awareness over time, and whether that correlates with a consistent proportion of recommendations or referrals in and among the other mentions. If you can successfully increase the ratio of direct brand recommendations as an overall share of reach and awareness, you’ll better make a case for designing efforts to reach larger audiences.

7. Brand Recognition

Sometimes asking people if they know about you still works. That can be an informal straw poll on larger social networks, or a more structured survey of a broader audience through something like a market research firm. Sometimes called recall, the idea here is looking at everything from whether people can and do name your brand inside of a relevant market category, or in association with other relevant ideas or concepts. It can be an interesting broad-brush look at whether you’re present in people’s minds in the ways that matter to you.

8. Brand-Specific Searches

Take a look at your analytics traffic for your website, and see what people are typing into search when they’re referred to you. Are they searching for general industry terms, like “car repair shop in Austin”, or are they specifically searching for “Bob’s Repair Shop Austin”? Look at the ratio to brand searches vs. keyword searches and see how that ratio changes over time. Keyword searches represent a broader need, while brand-specific searches are an indicator that you’re being sought out specifically.

9. Sentiment Trends

There’s a lot of talk about sentiment and what it can or can’t tell you. What we at Radian6 chat a lot about is the value of sentiment as a trend metric, looking at the volume and ratio increase, decrease, or stagnation over a broader time period. While impressions can tell you volume of mentions, coupling them with sentiment trends can tell you whether the brand impression overall is favorable or not. Want to get really granular? Start dissecting, say, the positive sentiment segment and look at the makeup. Are they mostly compliments? Recommendations? Nice words about your staff?

10. Content Resonance

Also firmly with a foot in the engagement camp, watching how content gets shared across the web will also certainly point you toward how many people are seeing what you’re up to. Along with first level shares and spread of your content – the tweets, subscription impressions, website hits – you can also dig into the notion of secondary reach. That means looking at who in your network reshared and passed along your content: retweets, reblogs, shares, or inbound links from spinoff content. Add a time series layer to that – how long the shares and reshares continue to trickle out to the web – and you’ll start seeing the kinds of content that reverberate well.

As we talked about in the post about 10 Key Engagement Metrics to Track, single metrics on their own aren’t really worth much. The real trick is to connect the dots and tie them together so that you can see how several measurements, in tandem, point to progress toward your business goals.

So what are you tracking that indicates reach and awareness in your world? How are you using those measurements to correlate with your sales and engagement data? Would love to hear from you in the comments.

The good folks at The Social Customer put together a comprehensive ebook that hones in on the essence of customer service and the idea of answering the social phone, and we’re glad we could be a part of its creation. Our VP of Marketing, David Alston, helped round out this valuable conversation, which also touched on concepts like:

• The value of customer communities, for both customers and organizations.
• The very real opportunity of monetizing a branded community.
• Being available to your customers via their channels of choice.
• Aligning your organization to encourage customer feedback and integrate that feedback into future product and service plans.
• The importance of solidifying the foundation of customer service in your organization before diving into social media.

This ebook is filled with use cases and advice from some of the social media, customer service, and CRM industries’ most valuable players. We recommend you download it and take a read through to see how the growing collaborative relationships between businesses and customers are shifting the practice of customer service into high definition.

We’ve broken down each chapter by metric type, with the first chapter providing some context and caveats for you to consider before diving into the meat of this ebook.

The second chapter covers metrics for establishing the awareness, attention, and reach of your brand by breaking down what each particular metric really means, giving you and idea of which pieces of the social media pie fall under the umbrella of those metrics, and offering up a step-by-step process as to how to measure each.

Chapters 3 and 4 follow that same format and cover metrics for leads, conversions, sales, and cost savings. In February’s ebook, we also provided a list of metrics you can refer to, to measure the impact of your community building endeavors, and we’ll be tackling that topic down the line, as well.

If you’ve had a tough time figuring out exactly how to track and measure your social media efforts, please don’t hesitate to grab this ebook, and let us know if it helps you find your balance a bit. And please, feel free to ask us any questions you’ve got – we’re here to help!

One of the biggest hurdles to jump in integrating social media into a business is figuring out the most cost-effective and functional way to scale its use. As your organization grows and continues to weave social media into its processes, it will be critical to establish a workflow that extends across departments while still allowing your teams to engage efficiently.

The need for a tool that helps businesses scale and simultaneously streamline their social media working processes is growing by leaps and bounds, which is why we are thrilled to announce the release of our upcoming product, the Radian6 Engagement Console.

Radian6’s new Engagement Console is a desktop application that:

• Extends social media monitoring, listening, and engagement to every desktop within your company.
• Is a complete social Web client that lets you listen to all media types, including blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn Answers, Facebook fan pages & public discussion groups, as well as online mainstream news sites.
• Allows real-time collaboration among your team members and one-click-workflow assignment of posts enabling faster and more cost effective engagement.
• Ties into the full power of Radian6, so your teams can channel the right conversations to the right people within your enterprise.
• Records all interactions in Radian6 for comprehensive operational reporting, and conversation analysis and reporting.

The Engagement Console is outfitted with a number of features to help you organize and maximize social media monitoring and engagement throughout your department and company.

Comprehensive Listening Coverage

Customize a listening grid by breaking out your conversation stacks by broad or specific topics, tagged customer lists, or even user assignment. Stacks for your Radian6 topic profile can be separated out by media type to keep you in the loop on exactly where people are talking about your brand or area of expertise.

Fast-Moving, Streamlined Workflow

Open up the Workflow function next to your Radian6 conversation stacks to tag, assign, and route posts to team members, and watch them respond in real time. Pull up a stack of your own assignments and start engaging on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and conversation threads right from the Engagement Console. For even more efficiency, create one-click workflow buttons that assign priority, status, sentiment, and user assignment to multiple posts all at once.

All the conversations you choose to participate in – and the ensuing engagement between your team and external constituents – will be recorded for reference. Review how your team handled the conversation, any notes they provided, and see how your interaction impacted and rippled through the larger business community.

Multi-Network Integration and Social Profile Viewing

Keep pace with all the activity happening around multiple Twitter accounts as well as your Facebook account with the Engagement Console. Tweet, reply, retweet, and send direct messages, shuffle through user profiles, and follow new contacts right from the platform. For added ease of use, click on the Auto-Shorten URL function.

Follow the activity on Facebook by observing and responding to status updates, wall posts, comments, and “likes”. Also view news feeds for your Facebook friends, see new photos or videos as they’re being uploaded, and leave your own comments and status updates without leaving the Console.

For a more well-rounded and contextual look at the people in your community, click on the name of a particular user to check out their comprehensive social profile, including where they can be found online and a history of interaction, notes you’ve made, and conversations you’ve had with them.

Reporting and Analysis

Within your Radian6 stack, take a look at the post volume for your particular topic profile with the built-in, at-a-glance time series graph. Click through to access the Radian6 dashboard to review and analyze metrics, segment and filter your data for micro-level analysis, and generate reports for your department and management teams.

Want More?

The Engagement Console is currently being previewed and will be available to Radian6 users in April 2010.

If you head on over to our Preview page, you’ll see a form you can fill out to let us know you’re interested in the Engagement Console. We’ll keep you in the loop as things progress and let you know exactly when it launches in April.

We’re excited about this announcement and what the Engagement Console will potentially do to advance the cause of listening and engaging within the enterprise. Have initial questions? Please let us know in the comments!

While no single metric alone is going to be a solid indicator of how engaged your community or customers are, there are a few things you can look at that help guide you toward the conversations and interactions to pay attention to for deeper analysis. Here’s our take on a few of the engagement metrics to watch for.

1. Comments

One of the most popular ways of looking at engagement is how active the discussion is on any one piece of content or post. The quality and value of comments is another discussion altogether, but looking at the spark of conversation ignited by a post can be an interesting indicator of whether folks are listening, and that they’re compelled to speak up and respond.

2. Unique commenters

Some communities are incredibly tight knit or niche, which means that you might have fewer people contributing to the overall dialogue (think the 80/20 rule here). But at a high level, looking at an increase in unique commenters over time can signal not just that you’re reaching more eyes and ears, but that your work is compelling more and more people to emerge and discuss, rather than just a core contingent of fans. After all, the potential rabid fans must first make themselves known.

3. Thread size

Forums are still alive and well, especially in some tech, telco and automotive sectors (to name a few). And if you’ve got a community where you’re posting discussion questions or even FAQs and support items, looking at the length and breadth of the threaded discussion that follows can not only show you how invested your members are, but whether the discussions are proving useful and impactful for them.

4. Time with Content

Some engagement can actually be passive, meaning that the people reading or interacting with the content might be very interested, but quiet. Forrester explains on their Groundswell technographics ladder that there are people in this camp. Sometimes, they might even take your content or ideas as inspiration to create something of their own, and may not say so directly. Sometimes, looking at how long people spend perusing your content or the community discussions can indicate deep interest, even if it isn’t verbalized.

5. Content Downloads

Another popular way of assuming engagement, downloads of content like whitepapers, ebooks, or even blog posts can indicate interest in the subject matter. It’s a little looser in implication since it’s harder to track what happens AFTER the content download without doing some follow up. Are they actually getting around to reading the content and, even better, doing something with it? But looking at downloads can be a great leading indicator of engagement around a topic or subject.

6. Subscriptions

Folks signing up to your blog or newsletter or publication indicates, plain and simple, that they’re interested in what you have to say. And while true engagement is often looked at as something more interactive, subscriptions are the door opener to bring someone into the fold, and give you and them more opportunity to converse, discuss, and iterate on the content and subjects themselves.

7. Content Sharing

Another leading indicator that someone cares about what you’re doing? They tell someone else. Retweets, Stumbles, bookmarks on Delicious, even emails or blog posts. And whether or not they comment actively themselves on a regular basis, they’re demonstrating their perception of value in the material by being willing to share it along to their network. Another interesting look at this kind of statistic: how many of the shares come complete with additional positive commentary (vs. shares that say “ugh, did you SEE this piece of junk?”).

8. Suggestions/Feedback/Comments

If your community is well engaged, they’re going to invest their time and brain power in guiding you toward business improvements. Things like suggestions, product improvement ideas, innovation forums like IdeaStorm, or voting and commenting on proposed ideas can all indicate a vested interest on behalf of the people you’re trying to reach. If they care about what you’re doing and how, you have a great opportunity to line up your efforts better with the needs of the people that drive your work.

9. Spinoff Content

As I alluded to with #4, sometimes folks engage with your content or company by carrying those ideas elsewhere and applying them to expanded ideas. Sometimes that can come in the form of spinoff content, which you can often identify through inbound links, as folks can often link back to the content that originally sparked their idea. If they don’t, listening to topics similar to those you’re discussing can help unearth spinoff content.

10. Recommendations

Recommendations and endorsements sort of have a foot in both the sales metric and engagement metric camp, so we’ll talk more about the sales side in a couple of weeks. But posts and comments that recommend your business to others can be a strong indicator of that person’s connection and level of commitment to you. This is how you start to find those undiscovered evangelists and fans, and empower them with more information and access to act as your ambassador.

Remember about engagement: The metrics above are indicators, not guarantees. The hypothesis here is that by interacting with content or people on a more obvious and consistent basis, the individual is demonstrating a more committed interest in what you’re saying or doing. What you need to understand for yourself is what engagement means to you, in context of what you’re trying to achieve through same.

That  means the real value is in tying any or all of the above metrics into other, more specific measurements that indicate positive progress toward business goals. Correlating comments with increased email subscriptions. Lining up an increase in content downloads with an increase in leads, and better yet, conversion rates for those leads. You can also make a case that anything related to sales could be considered an engagement metric: leads, referrals, sales themselves. We’ll tackle those in a different metrics post later in the month.

And the Ultimate Engagement Metric is still the sale itself. All of these indicators above are designed to help increase the likelihood that someone will pay more attention to you, more often, and eventually buy from you. Let’s face it, we don’t say “yay, we got more comments!” and stop there. We want more comments, because that indicates that we have people’s attention. Attention is currency. More focused  and persistent attention increases the odds that when someone needs to buy what we have, they’ll look to us.

We’ll talk more next week about the top metrics for tracking awareness and reach. In the meantime, when you track engagement, what are you looking for? The comments are open, and we’re waiting to hear from you.

So you’ve turned to your agency and asked them to help you understand how they leverage social media. What is the first thing they do? Well, they probably wow you with a lot of interesting case studies and statistics demonstrating the power of the tools. It’s at this moment you realize you aren’t Dell, Comcast or Southwest Airlines. What can you do to get the train back on track?

You would be wise to suggest to the agency (hopefully they’ve suggested it themselves) that they do some sort of benchmarking on your behalf. Benchmarking is a critical first step in any program. Whether it’s doing content analysis or surveys, you need to understand where the starting line is for your organization.

Beth Harte wrote a post last year in which she outlined the seven holy grails of PR. One of those holy grails was researched benchmarks. PR, social media, marketing–it almost doesn’t matter. Researched benchmarks are a critical first step toward the success of any campaign.

With that in mind, what are some things you can benchmark when starting your social media campaign?

1. Share of conversation – My friend David Alston, and Radian6’s VP of Marketing, would likely tell you that social media isn’t all about the eyeballs. I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment, but would say that gauging share of conversation is helpful from at least a brand awareness perspective.
2. Where conversations are happening – Before you launch headlong into Twitter, it would be helpful to know if your customers are actually there.
3. Core messaging – Yes, social media isn’t all about pushing core messaging. However, it will be helpful to know what people are saying in reference to your brand. Implicit in that is what, specifically, is driving conversation.
4. Who is influential – Everyone, and every industry has their own definition on who is influential. Be sure to define, through listening or whatever other means, who is influential in your space before you get started.
5. Search – If you didn’t know this already, search and social media are inextricably linked. There are plenty of free tools that will show you what people are searching for. What are the key terms people are using? What is on the first page of Google results? Is your brand there?
6. Web analytics – Similar to search, what shows up on your Web site is equally critical to what’s being said in social media. Know how many unique visitors you have, what the referring sites are and percentage of new vs. returning visitors.

These are just six things that I would recommend you benchmark, but obviously you want to come up with researched benchmarks that make sense for your campaign. What other metrics have you researched? What’s worked well? What hasn’t? Looking forward to hearing your point of view.

Chuck Hemann, a 2010 Society for New Communications Research Fellow, is currently a social media associate for WCG, a global media services company focused on the corporate and product marketing and communications needs of leading healthcare companies. You can follow Chuck on Twitter.

MSN.com has created a destination for fans interested in following the social media trends of the nominees. The MSN Award Buzz page features visualizations of the conversations online and predicts the winners. The application tracks public mentions across forums, blogs, news articles, Twitter, and comments for nominees in the Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress categories.

Predictions for award winners are made based on the volume and sentiment of these mentions. The predictions are then compared to expert picks from MSN sources in a graphic that visualizes both the volume and tone of the posts. You can also explore recent and relevant posts from the social web.

Created for MSN by interactive agency Deep Focus and Radian6, MSN Award Buzz launched just after the nominees were announced and has been tracking all the online Oscar-focused conversations leading up to this weekend’s show. Deep Focus created the cool application and visualization while Radian6’s platform powers the collection and analysis of social media mentions and feeds the application.

The overall buzz surrounding the Oscars has really begun to pick up with the show just a few days away. But don’t worry if you can’t catch it all—the MSN Award Buzz application will continue tracking the pulse of the online space live throughout the award’s ceremony. Check it out and see how your predictions compare with those of the experts and the public.

SOCAP Symposium
Atlanta, Georgia
April 25th-28th, 2010

Radian6 will be in Atlanta this April attending the SOCAP (Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals) symposium.  We’ll be exhibiting our platform during this 3-day event so be sure to come and check us out.  As well, our CMO David Alston (@davidalston) will be there to participate in an interactive learning session the morning of the 28th.   For more information about agenda and registration details, check out their site at www.socap.org.